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Bacon, F. (1605) The Advancement of Learning, ed.
G.W.
Kitchin, London: Dent, 1976. (Bacon’s discussion of ‘characters real’ occurs in book 2, chapter 16.) |
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Bacon, F. (1620) The New Organon, ed.
F.H.
Anderson, New York: Macmillan, 1960. (Bacon criticizes words as ‘idols of the marketplace’ in book I, aphorisms 43, 59–60.) |
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Dalgarno, G. (1834) The Works of George Dalgarno, Edinburgh; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1971. (Contains all of Dalgarno’s writings on artificial language schemes, including his 1661 Ars Signorum.) |
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Descartes, R. (1991) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3 (The Correspondence), trans.
J.
Cottingham, R.
Stoothoof, D.
Murdoch and A.
Kenny, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Descartes’ letter to Mersenne is dated 20 November 1629.) |
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Katz, D.S. (1982) Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England (1603–1655), Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Chapter 2 argues persuasively for the importance of the idea of an Adamic language in seventeenth-century England.) |
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Knowlson, J. (1975) Universal Language Schemes in England and France 1600–1800, Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press. (The best survey of the topic; contains a valuable checklist of universal language schemes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.) |
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Leibniz, G.W. (1966) Logical Papers, trans. and ed.
G.H.R.
Parkinson, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (The fullest collection in English of Leibniz’s writings on logic and language; includes selections from his 1666 essay On the Art of Combinations, in which appears his earliest plan for a universal language.) |
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Mersenne, M. (1636) Harmonie Universelle, Paris; repr. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1986. (Book I, proposition 24 contains Mersenne’s proposal for a ‘perfect language’, in which mathematical and scientific truths would be expressed by combinations of musical tones.) |
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Rutherford, D. (1995) ‘Philosophy and Language’, in N.
Jolley (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, New York: Cambridge University Press. (A comprehensive review of Leibniz’s interests in language, including the idea of a universal language.) |
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Salmon, V. (1988) The Study of Language in 17th-Century England, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (A collection of ground-breaking essays on the projects of Dalgarno, Wilkins and their contemporaries; includes a bibliography of recent work in the area.) |
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Slaughter, M.M. (1982) Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An important study of the relationship between seventeenth-century scientific thinking and the idea of a universal language.) |
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Wilkins, J. (1668) An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, London; repr. in the series English Linguistics 1500–1800, number 119, Menston: Scolar Press, 1968. (Wilkins’ attempt at constructing a universal language, discussed in §2 above.) |