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Adam Schaff Quotes
1913–2006 Poland
Adam Schaff (March 10, 1913 – Nov. 12, 2006) was a Polish Marxist philosopher, Professor at the University of Warsaw, and director of a sociological institute in Vienna. Schaaf made notable contributions to the fields of semantics (1962), the philosophy of man (1963), language and cognition (1964), marxism and individualism (1970), history and truth (1971), alienation as a social phenomenon (1980), microelectronics and society (1982), and pragmatism (1984).
Random Adam Schaff quote
11 quotes
Through the prevailing social consciousness, social relations give shape to the individual who is born and educated in a specific society. In this sense, social relations create the individual.
De Saussur... develops the concept of semiology as the science which studies the functioning of signs in society, and treats linguistics as a branch of such a general science of signs.
A system of opinions which, being founded on a system of accepted values, determines the attitudes and behavior of men with respect to desired objectives of development of the society, social group or individual.
Adam Schaff (1967)
By contrast to the thesis which sets science against ideology, another thesis is presented here contrasting that which sets science against ideology. It maintains that not only are the propositions of science and ideology linked, in some cases they are even identical.
Carnap : a language, as e.g. English, is a system of activities or, rather, of habits, i.e., dispositions to certain activities, serving mainly for the purposes of communication and of co-ordination of activities among the members of a group.
For Bréal, semantics was the science the subject matter of which was study of the cause and structure of the processes of changes in meanings of words: expansion and contraction of meanings, transfer of meanings, elevation and degradation of their value, etc.
Science and ideology are closely connected to each other, in spite of those pedants who would like to separate them. In any case, since social praxis, which produces and promotes the develópment of language, is the common basis for both the relatively objective knowledge of the world, and for attitudes of evaluation, a genetic link exists.
Semantics (semasiology) is a branch of linguistics. The questions which are of particular interest in this connection are — with what is that branch of linguistics concerned, and in what does it see the distinction between itself and the semantic problems found in contemporary logic.
Humanism does not exist in itself, just as man taken in himself and for himself does not exist. Only concrete man exists, man set in a particular age, living in a particular country, belonging to a particular social class, representing a particular tradition and particular personal ideals.
Adam Schaff (1947)
When in accordance with the materialistic analysis of the cognitive process we consider thought and human consciousness as linguistic thought, as thought made of language (Marx maintained that language is “my consciousness and that of others”), it is evident that any analysis of the cognitive process must also be the analysis of the linguistic process, without which thought is simply impossible.
For Witold Doroszewski, at the root of semantic analysis lies the philosophical issue of the relationship between the general and the particular, the starting point being the analysis of the function of the copula "is". Doroszewski analyses the problem of meaning as closely linked with denotation. It is in that question that he sees the focal point of semantics.