Book review
Language, Mind, and Body: A conceptual history. By John E. Joseph.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. x, 282 pp. ISBN 978-1107149557 £ 85 (HB). ISBN 978-1316603956 £ 23.99 (PB, 2020)

Reviewed by David Cram
Jesus College, University of Oxford
Table of contents

This is a lively and entertaining book that will appeal to an informed general public and also, as I wish to argue, serve as a valuable instructional text for use in various disciplines of the cognitive sciences, undergraduate and graduate alike. The second readership is clearly targeted by the differential pricing of the paperback second edition that has now appeared (2020), three years after the hardback first edition. The book sets out to give the reader a bird’s-eye view of the history of Western thinking about language, not in the form of a potted account of the disciplines grouped together under the rubric of the language sciences but taking a broader view which can include any aspect of thought and culture which touches on the perennial problem (or ‘puzzlement’) of the relation between body and mind. This objective might at first sight seem recklessly ambitious. But the book takes a route that is kerbed on both sides of the road: on the one hand it follows the history of Western linguistic thought from a focal viewpoint of the mind-body issue; on the other hand, it tracks the development of Western thinking about the mind-body problem from a consistently language-oriented standpoint. This renders the journey clearly sign-posted for the reader and makes for comfortable travelling.

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