Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomskyis an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy, and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He has spent more than half a century at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is Institute Professor Emeritus, and is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth7 December 1928
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
Over the years, there have been a series of concepts developed to justify the use of force in international affairs for a long period. It was possible to justify it on the pretext, which usually turned out to have very little substance, that the U.S. was defending itself against the communist menace. By the 1980s, that was wearing pretty thin.
Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.
It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its 2008-9 attack on Gaza, with full U.S. support and illegally using U.S. weapons.
Chinese military spending is carefully monitored by the United States.
I have been - I have spoken in Bir Zeit a number of times.
I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.
I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can't explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?
Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can't compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan's free market enthusiasms.
There are nuclear-weapons-free zones in several parts of the world already, except that they're not implemented fully, because the U.S. won't allow it.
Under Clinton, the defiance of world order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts.
Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.
Free institutions certainly exist, but a tradition of passivity and conformism restricts their use - a cynic might say that this is why they continue to exist.
France had a policy, initiated by General de Gaulle, of trying to turn Europe into what was then called a 'third force,' independent of the two superpowers, so Europe should pursue an independent course.
From the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the U.S. economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing.