The Intelligent Mind ― On the Genesis and Constitution of Discursive Thought

The Intelligent Mind investigates the psychological emergence and reality of language and thought, whose comprehension is barred by the prevailing dogmas of mind/body dualism, of the reduction of mind to consciousness, and of the identification of consciousness with discursive awareness. Repudiating these dogmas, The Intelligent Mind shows how minds that do not yet speak or think can generate and acquire discursive rationality. Overcoming the mystery of the origin and learning of language, this book explores how the development of language diverges from the development of thinking, despite the dependence of thought upon linguistic intelligence. Drawing upon Hegel and a wide range of more recent philosophical, as well as psychological and linguistic, research, The Intelligent Mind explains how semiotic imagination and grammar enable mind to advance from imagery to imageless concepts. Although this leaves thinking in need of language to transcend figurative representation, it is shown how the protean generative character of language enables thought to be autonomous and to theorize truly about itself.

Richard Dien Winfield is Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Georgia, USA, where he has taught since 1982. He is president of the Society for Systematic Philosophy and past president of the Hegel Society of America and of the Metaphysical Society of America. This is his eighteenth authored book; his past works include The Just Economy; The Just State; Systematic Aesthetics; Modernity, Religion, and the War on Terror; Hegel and Mind; The Living Mind; Hegel's Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures; Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Rethinking in Seventeen Lectures; and Hegel and the Future of Systematic Philosophy.