John Joseph’s monograph Language, Mind and Body: A Conceptual History was published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press. In this short text we will provide a general overview of the academic problematics that the book addresses, as well as a presentation of its structure, without endeavoring to critically review the work. Already the exciting formulation of the academic problem studied by John Joseph, as well as the book’s coverage of a very broad spectrum of time (from antiquity to the present), together with a large number of analyzed scientific trends and the author’s intention to integrate both historical and contemporary concerns into this study (something that is relatively rare in the contemporary linguistic academic world), encourages one to hope that a detailed analysis of the book is still to come, and that such a review will be produced on a much larger scale than the modest format for presenting a book in a scientific journal.

The general questions on which John Joseph’s work is based and to which it is devoted are as follows: “What is language and where is it located?” The book traces the long history of research that attempts to answer this question, including studies conducted within the framework of disciplines as varied as linguistics, philosophy, psychology and medicine, just to name a few. The following opposing tendencies are already mentioned in the text’s short Preface (pp. ix-x): to consider language in terms of mind on the one hand or, on the other, to connect language directly to the body “including the brain, the nervous system, the organs of speech production and sense perception” (p. ix). Analyzing these tendencies, the author tries to “probe into the problematic mind-body dichotomy itself” (p. ix), reconsidering some of the concepts of modern linguistics that are based on precisely this dichotomy.

The book is divided into ten chapters (including a Conclusion). The first chapter (“Purification and Hybrids”, pp. 1-19) presents the book’s problematics in detail; it also provides a general vision of the book’s structure. This chapter begins immediately (p. 1) with the author’s disagreement with Noam Chomsky’s insistence on a “close relation between innate properties of the mind and features of linguistic structure”¹. Indeed, Chomskian conception is widely disputed today. But if “the Chomskyan paradigm has broken, no new consensus has yet emerged” (p. 4)&: “a cornerstone of the Chomskyan consensus – the conception of mind – has shifted enough since the time when Chomsky formulated his views as to require deep and broad reconsideration of its place in and implications for linguistics. This it has been receiving over the last decade, and it is to this reconsideration that the present book is intended to contribute, by putting together the pieces of an intellectual heritage that gives due consideration to language in the body” (p. 4), which is “at least as old” as the “‘Cartesian’ view” (ibid.). If the Cartesian model (which is, of course, discussed in the book) has nevertheless dominated for so long, this can be explained not only by the fact that it “worked”, but also with the fact that “body-based approaches to consciousness and behaviour have sometimes had terrible outcomes” (ibid.), such as sexism and racism. According to John Joseph, Bruno Latour’s concept of the hybrid (even if the concept of hybridity was not Latour’s invention, as the author reminds us) turns out to be very useful in light of the general question raised by John Joseph’s book itself (the main Latourian source of inspiration for John Joseph is Bruno Latour’s famous Nous n’avons jamais été modernes : Essai d’anthropologie symétrique [1991]²): “Where language was concerned, Chomsky developed a new hybrid: a ‘grammar’ located in the individual speaker’s mind/brain. As Latour would predict, its hybridity was not acknowledged; rather, the grammar is presented as lodged firmly at the Nature pole, being based on universal features physically determined by the architecture of the human brain” (p. 12). At the same time, applying “Latour’s model helps us to specify what the difference is between Chomsky’s distinctions between competence and performance on the one hand, and I-language and E-language […] on the other” (p. 13). Indeed, “in Latour’s terms, the modern concept of mind is a hybrid. Depending on how it is used, it can occupy any point on nearly the whole of the Nature vs Subject/Society dichotomy” (p. 14). “Less obviously, the modern concept of brain is a hybrid as well. It strives towards the Nature pole, indeed it genuinely occupies that pole when it is a matter of just the physical organ, the mass of tissue and the electro-chemical reactions that take place within it. But the moment those things are related to what the brain does, it is pulled back towards the Subject/Society pole, for a variety of reasons” (p. 15). As John Joseph emphasizes, “applying Latour’s framework to the history of linguistics from the seventeenth century to the present, we have little trouble finding other dichotomies besides body-mind that mirror the polarization between Nature and Subject/Society. Their poles are always somewhat hybrid, since attempts to ‘purify’ a natural or conventional account of language have failed ever since Plato’s Cratylus.” At the same time, “the naturalizing of the genius of a language was a crucial first step in establishing what we call linguistics, as opposed to the study of language that preceded it. Linguistics begins historically with the erasing of speaking-writing subjects and their willful utterances” (p. 17).

The second chapter (“Language Incorporated”, pp. 20-45) dwells on the presented problem, at the same time providing an analysis of contemporary discussions on “how mind/cognition is extended/embodied/distributed” (p. 17) and on the place of language in these reflections. The following six chapters could be considered as “historical” ones (if we partly consider the “Modern Age” as belonging to history as well). Through the Latourian perspective, John Joseph discusses how language was perceived in its relation to mind and body during various eras – in Antiquity (by the Miletus philosophers, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus, among others: as John Joseph points out at p. 48, the aim of the third chapter [pp. 46-69] “is not to give a full conceptual history of the psychological and the physical concepts” that developed across the corresponding period, “but to trace the main lines, filling in those details that relate most directly to language”; the same remark turns out true for the following parts of the book); in the Middle Ages (with particular subchapters about Augustine’s Christian doctrine, “Bodies and Inner Speech”, “Medieval Medicine and Mind”, “Angelic Language and the Illuminated Vernacular” and rudiments of “empirical knowledge”) (Chapter 4, pp. 70-93); during the Renaissance (through the subchapters “Continuity in Medicine”, “Answering Shylock”, “Early Modern Medicine”, “Descartes” and “Neo-Epicureanism from Gassendi to Locke”) (Chapter 5, pp. 94-119); during the eighteenth (“Hartley’s Vibrations”, “Condillac and Rousseau”, “Reflex, Habit and Swearing”, “Reid and Scottish Common Sense”, “National Genius” and “Disembodiment”) and nineteenth (“Empire and Romanticism”, “Brain Localization”, “Bain’s Nervous-Muscular Associationism”, “Modern Linguistics and the Nature vs Subject/Society Polarization”, “Egger and Inner Speech”, “Saussure”, “Native Speakers and Standard Languages”) centuries (Chapters 6 and 7, pp. 120-144 and 145-171, correspondingly) and, finally, during “The (We have Never Been) Modern Age” (with particular subchapters devoted to modernism, behaviourism, Piaget and Vygotsky, Jakobson, Merleau-Ponty, Chomsky and biolinguistics and embodied cognition) (Chapter 8, pp. 172-200). This broad coverage of trends and traditions of thought of the past explains why the author of the book refers primarily to secondary sources – especially when analyzing more ancient texts. On the other hand, this breadth of coverage naturally presupposes a certain inevitable lacunarity of presentation.

For the readers of the Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, let us emphasize that a subchapter about Ferdinand de Saussure forms a part of the “Nineteenth century” chapter in John Joseph’s book (pp. 163-168), even if, of course, Saussure’s work going back to the beginning of the twentieth century is also discussed. In general, Saussure is one of the scholars who are most frequently mentioned in the book, especially with references to his notebooks and to his university lectures,³ as well as to the best known books published under his name: his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Study of the Primitive System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages, 1879⁴) and, of course, the Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics, 1916⁵). John Joseph’s remarks about Saussure’s “semiotic” reflections, with references to the notion of sign, are particularly interesting. The influence that psychologist, philosopher and epistemologist Victor Egger (1848-1909) exerted on Saussure’s thinking and work is also worth mentioning in this regard. As John Joseph specifies, “the Saussurean sign would furnish the basis for structural linguistics in the twentieth century. His notes on Egger are important indicators of how Saussure’s thinking about language came to take the direction that it did in this period, and how general ideas that were implicit in his earlier work came to take shape in an overt theory of linguistic signs” (p. 163). One of the best known specialists of Saussurean linguistics today, in speaking about Saussure John Joseph refers to his own works about the Geneva linguist.⁶

Chapter 9 (pp. 201-232), as its title indicates, deals with the question of “Abstract and Concrete Language” in light of the general problematics of the book, partly presenting a “case study” of epistemology of the recognition of the reality of hybrid concepts. Here the author often returns to the names and theories previously mentioned and analyzed in the monograph, at the same time shedding new light on them. The tenth and final chapter (“Conclusion”, pp. 233-244) summarizes the monograph, emphasizing the implications of its results for linguistic theory on the one hand, and for applied linguistics on the other. At the same time, this chapter points to some possible new research perspectives. The chapters are followed by the “Notes”, “References”, “Index of Names” and “Subject Index”.

John Joseph’s latest book will be of interest to numerous scholars in the domains of general and cognitive linguistics, philosophy of language, (bio)semiotics and of course – last but not least – history of language sciences, including history of Saussurean linguistics. In particular, let us hope that in the future the general question raised in the book might be studied through the prism of works written by Ferdinand de Saussure’s immediate followers and their adherents and pupils from the “Geneva linguistic school”.