Korzybski a biography of shakespeare

Kodish's clear prose provides a compellingly readable narrative of Korzybski's very busy, sometimes too busy, exciting and exhausting life while making accessible some of the most complex areas of Korzybski's thought. For years to come, this outstanding biography will remain the standard work on Alfred Korzybski's extraordinarily adventurous and significant life and work.

Convert currency. Add to basket. Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. Seller Inventory Contact seller. Condition: Fair. Buy with confidence! Book is in acceptable condition with wear to the pages, binding, and some marks within 2. Seller Inventory bkxvzzvxacp. Seller: GF Books, Inc. Book is in Used-VeryGood condition. Pages and cover are clean and intact.

Used items may not include supplementary materials such as CDs or access codes. Feynman didn't know that it was Alfred Korzybski who had coined the term "time-binding" in his first,book "Manhood of Humanity" to label what he considered the defining characteristic of humans: the potential of each generation to start where the former leaves off and thus to accumulate useful knowledge at an ever-accelerating rate.

In the exact sciences and technology, time-binding seems to work reasonably well.

Korzybski a biography of shakespeare: Having completed what remained his central

In the rest of human life, not so much. Korzybski, a patriotic Polish nobleman and an engineer who had lived under Tsarist tyranny and had seen the horrors of World War I on the Eastern Front before coming to the United States, realized the results of the disparity between rapid but narrow scientific-technological advancement and broader but snail-paced ethical-social development: a seemingly endless cycle of crises, revolutions and wars.

Seeking a way out, he studied a broad range of disciplines from physics to psychiatry-fields that others felt had little to do with each other-and discovered factors of sanity in physico-mathematical methods. Comparing the ways of thinking that scientists and mathematicians exemplify when working at their best and the ways of thinking that they and other people unsanely or insanely tend to use the rest of the time, Korzybski linked science and sanity in a new world outlook with an accompanying methodology labeled 'general semantics' -simple enough to teach children.

Korzybski a biography of shakespeare: Bukowski has a long line of

Traces of Korzybski's pioneering work can be found today in a variety of fields such as cognitive science, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, communication, media ecology, medicine, organizational development, philosophical counseling and philosophy, etc. In spite of this, Korzybski's radically interdisciplinary work remains relatively unassimilated into standard academic fields and hard to accurately fit into familiar popular categories.

Thus, Korzybski, who originated the saying "The map is not the territory", remains a relatively neglected and misunderstood figure, shrouded in controversy: some people have considered him a genius while others have called him a crank. Drawing on an array of sources including Korzybski's personal correspondence, notes, scrapbooks, and both published and unpublished writings, as well as personal discussions and interviews with some of Korzybski's closest co-workers, Bruce I.

Kodish situates Korzybski's contributions in the context of his times and provides surprising insights into his work as a whole. Kodish's clear prose provides a compellingly readable narrative of Korzybski's very busy, sometimes too busy, exciting and exhausting life while making accessible some of the most complex areas of Korzybski's thought.

For years to come, this outstanding biography will remain the standard work on Alfred Korzybski's extraordinarily adventurous and significant life and work. Convert currency. Born in WarsawVistula Countrywhich was then part of the Russian EmpireKorzybski belonged to an aristocratic Polish family whose members had worked as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers for generations.

He learned the Polish language at home and the Russian language in schools, and having a French and German governesshe became fluent in four languages as a child. Korzybski studied engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology. After being wounded in a leg and suffering other injuries, he moved to North America in first to Canada, then to the United States to coordinate the shipment of artillery to Russia.

He also lectured to Polish-American audiences about the conflict, promoting the sale of war bonds. After the war he decided to remain in the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in He met Mira Edgerly[ 3 ] a painter of portraits on ivory, shortly after the Armistice ; They married in January ; the marriage lasted until his death.

Dutton published Korzybski's first book, Manhood of Humanityin In this work he proposed and explained in detail a new theory of humankind: mankind as a " time-binding " class of life humans perform time binding by the transmission of knowledge and abstractions through time which become accreted in cultures. In andKorzybski observed psychiatric patients at St.

Elizabeth's hospital in D. Korzybski's work culminated in the initiation of a discipline that he named general semantics GS. This should not be confused with semantics. The basic principles of general semantics, which include time-binding, are described in the book Science and Sanitypublished in Korzybski maintained that humans are limited in what they know by 1 the structure of their nervous systems, and 2 the structure of their languages.

Humans cannot experience the world directly, but only through their "abstractions" nonverbal impressions or "gleanings" derived from the nervous system, and verbal indicators expressed and derived from language.

Korzybski a biography of shakespeare: Korzybski: A Biography (Paperback) ; Publisher:

These sometimes mislead us about what is the truth. Our understanding sometimes lacks similarity of structure with what is actually happening. He sought to train our awareness of abstracting, using techniques he had derived from his study of mathematics and science. He called this awareness, this goal of his system, "consciousness of abstracting".

His system included the promotion of attitudes such as "I don't know; let's see," in order that we may better discover or reflect on its realities as revealed by modern science. Another technique involved becoming inwardly and outwardly quiet, an experience he termed, "silence on the objective levels". Many devotees and critics of Korzybski reduced his rather complex system to a simple matter of what he said about the verb form "is" of the general verb "to be.

He thought that certain uses of the verb "to be", called the "is of identity" and the "is of predication ", were faulty in structure, e. In Korzybski's system, one's assessment of Elizabeth belongs to a higher order of abstraction than Elizabeth herself. Thus, Korzybski, who originated the saying "The map is not the territory," remains a relatively neglected and misunderstood figure, shrouded in controversy: some people have considered him a genius while others have called him a crank.

Drawing on an array of sources including Korzybski's personal correspondence, notes, scrapbooks, and both published and unpublished writings, as well as personal discussions and interviews with some of Korzybski's closest co-workers, Bruce I. Kodish situates Korzybski's contributions in the context of his times and provides surprising insights into his work as a whole.