Noam Chomsky · Politics
Chomsky’s other revolution: that the human capacity for language is innate (universal grammar), the clearest proof that creativity is native to the mind - and his claim that this creative human nature is the very ground of his case against domination, since a being born free and creative cannot justly be ruled as if it were a blank slate.
You learned that Chomsky argued language is innate (the ‘poverty of the stimulus’ shows a child knows far more than experience could teach, so universal grammar must be built in), that this reveals creativity as native to the mind, and that he made this creative human nature the foundation of his politics…
Leads to Wilhelm von Humboldt.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.