Description: Michael Halewood uses ideas from analytic philosophy and continental philosophy as well as social theory to look at how language relates to the world, and the world to language. He addresses important questions such as whether words are able to capture the world (nouns); whether the properties of things, such as colours, are real (adjectives); and how we can think about the world as process (verbs). Primarily using the work of Alfred North Whitehead, but also incorporating the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, John Dewey and Luce Irigaray, he argues that viewing both the world and language as 'in process' can help reframe and move beyond some enduring problems and shed new light for future research.
Brief description: Michael Halewood is Professor in Sociology at the University of Essex. He is the author of Language and Process: Words, Whitehead and the World (EUP, 2020), Rethinking the Social through Durkheim, Marx, Weber and Whitehead (Anthem Press, 2014) and A. N. Whitehead and Social Theory: Tracing a Culture of Thought (Anthem Press, 2011). He is co-editor of Butler on Whitehead (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). He is the translator of The Lure of Possibilities by Didier Debaise (Duke University Press, 2017).
Review Quotes: We use language all the time without worries; but when we try to actively think about how words relate to the world, we are immediately perplexed. In this book, Michael Halewood deftly winds a way through these difficulties, showing us how language is part of the world, rather than something that comments upon it from outside.-- "Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University"