Richard L. Epstein
As speakers of English, German, or Romance languages it is hard for us to conceive of the world as flux, the flow of all, with no or only a quite secondary idea of individual things that persist through their changes.
In Language and the World: Essays New and Old I’ve tried to make it possible for you to enter that way of encountering the world with essays by linguists and anthropologists who have described people who talk and live with that conception. That is important and useful background, but not essential, for I have set out the basic idea of the world as flow in the first two chapters. In this volume I hope to explore more clearly that conception by asking how we can reason in accord with it.
This is an attempt, a first attempt as far as I know, to give a systematic analysis of how to reason that is not tied to our European languages, to step out of our language conceptions and habits. Consider then this work as a bridge, a chance for us as speakers of languages that focus primarily on the world as made up of things to begin to see the richness and complexity of encountering the world as the flow of all, the one and not many. The contrasts, often unsettling, can lead us to understand better how we encounter and reason about the world as made up of things.