Noam Chomsky is well known and deeply admired for being the creator of contemporary linguistics, among the founders of the field of cognitive science, and perhaps one of the most avidly go through political theorist and commentator of our period. In these lectures, he presents a lifetime of philosophical reflection on all three of these areas of study to which he offers contributed for over half of a century.

In very clear, precise, and non-technical language, Chomsky elaborates on fifty many years of technological development in what Sort of Creatures Are We? in the study of language, sketching how his very own work offers implications for the roots of vocabulary, the close relations that vocabulary bears to idea, and its eventual biological basis. He expounds and criticizes many alternative theories, such as the ones that emphasize the social, the communicative, and the referential aspects of language. Chomsky critiques how new discoveries about vocabulary overcome what seemed to be extremely problematic assumptions in the past. He also investigates the apparent scope and limits of individual cognitive capacities and what the human mind can seriously investigate, in the light of history of research and philosophical reflection and current understanding. Shifting from vocabulary and mind to culture and politics, he concludes with a searching exploration and philosophical defense of a posture he identifies as ‘libertarian socialism,’ tracing its links to anarchism as well as the tips of John Dewey, and even briefly to the tips of Marx and Mill, demonstrating its conceptual growth out of our background and urgent relation to issues of the present.