Roy Harris is Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Oxford and an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall. His extensive academic experience, including teaching posts in Hong Kong, Boston, and Paris, and visiting fellowships across South Africa, Australia, and India, has shaped his profound insights into the nature of language. Harris's work delves into the intricate relationship between language, thought, and society, exploring how linguistic structures and usage reflect and influence human cognition and social interactions. His scholarly contributions offer a deep examination of the fundamental ways language shapes our understanding of the world and each other.
Set against the backdrop of an epic space journey, the story follows four generations aboard the Protostar, a massive ship, as they uncover their family's legacy and the sacrifices made to seek a new world. A century after their departure, the narrative delves into the origins of their mission, revealing the passion and determination that drove them to embark on this monumental quest for survival and civilization's future.
The book presents a provocative argument that reason is not an inherent trait of the human mind but rather a construct shaped by the evolution of literacy in European cultures. Harris critiques the traditional view of rational thought, tracing its development from Classical Greece to contemporary symbolic logic, suggesting that Western notions of reason are deeply intertwined with cultural and historical contexts rather than being universally innate.