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Cartesian Linguistics The topics that were of interest to Chomsky during this period are interconnected in various ways. In Cartesian Linguistics, for example, Chomsky elaborates the relationship between empiricist and rationalist approaches. The book is part of the Studies in Language Series, which Chomsky and Halle edited for Harper and Row, and which was intended "to deepen our understanding of the nature of language and the mental processes and structures that underlie its use and acquisition" (Cartesian Linguistics ix). Chomsky wrote the text while he was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies; he did so with the assistance of the National Institutes of Health at Harvard University, the Center for Cognitive Studies, and a grant from the Social Science Research Council. Prior to publication, he presented his findings in the context of the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton at the invitation of R. P. Blackmur and on the suggestion of Edward Cone from the music department and Richard Rorty from philosophy. His presentation took the form of six weekly lectures, running from 25 February until 8 April 1964. Chomsky had been asked to link his interests in formal language and the analysis of syntax to literature; but since he did not consider himself to be "in a position to say anything significant relating to literature," he instead offered to address "the topic of structure of language and philosophy of mind, and, in particular, to try to develop some notions that were extensively discussed in the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries, though rarely since" (Otero, "Chomsky and the Challenges" 15). Seminar participants made some useful comments in response to the lectures, as did several of Chomsky's friends and colleagues, such as William Bottiglia, Roman Jakobson, Louis Kampf, Jerry Katz, and John Viertel. According to Otero, "the audience included very sophisticated people and . . . the lectures were well received" ("Chomsky and the Challenges" 16). In a letter he wrote to Chomsky a few weeks after the seminars had ended, Cone wrote: "It's almost unheard of for a man to keep his entire audience through all six sessions. Your ideas are still resounding through the halls of the Philosophy Department here. Please come again!" (qtd. in Otero, "Chomsky and the Challenges" 15 ­ 16). The resulting text, which was substantially written up in a number of weeks, is an extremely original piece of research, and ranges beyond the field of linguistics; it stands as a contribution to the field of intellectual history, what is sometimes called the history of ideas. And it created a tremendous stir at the time ­ as it did later on.

Dictionnire de Port-Royale au XVIIe siecle (version française)

The year after Cartesian Linguistics appeared, Hans Aarslef, regarded as a leading scholar in the field, published a major book "in which," Chomsky writes, "he described traditional universal grammar as solely `Cartesian' in origin, completely ignoring the quite obvious Renaissance and earlier origins that are emphasized in Cartesian Linguistics" (31 Mar. 1995). He had not seen Cartesian Linguistics when he wrote his book, "though he knew I was working on it, and had lectured about the topics at Princeton ­ he was away" when Chomsky's lectures were given. But Aarslef did respond to Chomsky's book later, in a way that "shows something about the intellectual state of the field" (14 Aug. 1995). Chomsky recounts subsequent events: "a few years later . . . [Aarslef] wrote savage denunciations of Cartesian Linguistics (in Language, and elsewhere), claiming that I had made this idiotic error, which he did make [himself] a year after Cartesian Linguistics, and which is explicitly and unambiguously rejected in Cartesian Linguistics" (31 Mar. 1995). As Chomsky writes, Aarslef identified the error as the failure of Cartesian Linguistics "to recognize the pre-Cartesian sources of Port Royal and later work, which was not only false (they were explicitly and carefully mentioned) but pretty audacious, since in his independent book a year after Cartesian Linguistics he had referred to all of this work as solely Cartesian, without any mention of the earlier sources" (14 Aug. 1995). Such "absurdity and falsification," in Chomsky's view, is only to be expected. "Furthermore, [Aarslef's] version has become accepted Truth. I've never bothered to respond, because . . . my contempt for the intellectual world reaches such heights that I have no interest in pursuing them in their gutters, unless there are serious human interests involved, as [there often are] in the political realm . . ." (31 Mar. 1995). Two other scholars (Ilse Andrews and Henry Bracken) picked up on Aarslef's "audacity," but their published remarks had no impact. Chomsky's opening hypothesis in Cartesian Linguistics is that contemporary linguistics had lost touch with an earlier European tradition of linguistic studies, which he identified as Cartesian. The term "Cartesian" is not used here according to its generally accepted definition; Chomsky extends that definition to encompass, as he puts it, "a certain collection of ideas which were not expressed by Descartes, [were] rejected by followers of Descartes, and many first expressed by anti-Cartesians" (31 Mar. 1995). The work that Chomsky assigned to the Cartesian corpus, and the tradition of research that the Cartesians had upheld, was, in Chomsky's opinion, more pertinent than the research of contemporary scholars, and certainly more useful than that which was being produced in the field of the history of linguistics. To provide a "preliminary and fragmentary sketch of some of the leading ideas of Cartesian linguistics with no explicit analysis of its relation to current work that seeks to clarify and develop these ideas" was Chomsky's goal. His "primary aim" was "simply to bring to the attention of those involved in the study of generative grammar and its implications some of the little-known work which has bearing on their concerns and problems and which often anticipates some of their specific conclusions" (Cartesian Linguistics 2).

René Descartes

Chomsky was reaching back to sources of knowledge that date from the Renaissance. Especially drawn to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he embraced the works of, among others, René Descartes (1596 ­ 1650) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767 ­ 1835). To understand this impulse is to comprehend Chomsky's frequent claim that, despite his loathing of labels, he would be satisfied to be labeled a contributor to an anarchist (if properly defined) or an eighteenth-century rationalist tradition. In other words, in the same way that left-libertarian values run through much of Chomsky's political work from the 1940s on, rationalist ideas permeate much of his linguistic work from the late 1950s to the present.