6 - Names
Summary
With sustained winds during landfall of 125 mph … and minimum central pressure the third lowest on record at landfall (920 mb), Katrina caused widespread devastation along the central Gulf Coast states of the US. Cities such as New Orleans, LA, Mobile, AL, and Gulfport, MS bore the brunt of Katrina's force and will need weeks and months of recovery efforts to restore normality.
(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Climatic Data Center report, updated 29 December 2005)With Katrina in Mind, Obama Administration Says It's Ready for Irene.
(New York Times, headline, 27 August 2011)One method whereby nature and mind are organized and controlled (for better or worse) and by which textual divination takes place in literary contexts is through a process of naming and re-naming. This chapter addresses the nature of information in Judaic texts, focusing particularly on the written “names of God”. I argue that these names are the main instrument through which information is organized in Judaic systems. Names are a complex subject in the philosophy of language because they seem to work differently than other features of language: they tend to capture information that is much more specific than other forms of language. When names are written they take on entirely different properties than verbalized names because their physical form, not their sound, persists in time.
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- Judaic Technologies of the WordA Cognitive Analysis of Jewish Cultural Formation, pp. 97 - 116Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2012