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Jonathan Rée teaches philosophy at the University of Middlesex. As well as reviewing for the Guardian and Financial Times, he is the literary editor of the journal Radical Philosophy and co-editor of the Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers (1991). His other books include Philosophical Tales (1987), Proletarian Philosophers (1984), Philosophy and its Past (1978) and Descartes (1974).

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'I SEE A VOICE' Jonathan Ree
Language, deafness and the senses -a philosophical history

What's in a voice? Singing or talking, coaxing or ranting, whispering or chortling, the textures and tones of our voices are telling revelations of our individual personalities and moods. But there is nothing more political than the voice of the people; nothing more religious than the voice of God; nothing more unsettling than the voice of conscience. The voice is a many-layered phenomenon, enfolding within itself all the great themes of traditional philosophical reflection: nature and culture, reason and experience, transience and eternity, sincerity and duplicity, art and technique, truth and delusion, selfhood and annihilation, history and tradition, life and death.

'I SEE A VOICE' escorts its readers on a vast and eventful intellectual journey, taking in colour music and voice machines, shorthand and phonetics, Egyptian hieroglyphs, dance notations, and the origins of language, the division of the rainbow and the development of the music scale, Proust and Dickens, structuralism and phenomenology, talking parrots and silent films. Above all it tells the painful story of those who have literally no voice: the so-called 'deaf and dumb', whose inability to speak has usually been treated by the hearing world as proof that they are entirely unreasonable and probably less than human. And in a 'tour de force' of historical narration, Jonathan Ree reconstructs the historical plight of the deaf and the tortuous progress of deaf education.

At every turn of the story we run into a curious clutch of doctrines about the five senses, especially the differences between hearing and sight. These doctrines belong to common sense, but they have also been elaborated by the great philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Heidegger. They are intricately entwined with our entire experience of the world, and yet – as Ree demonstrates with vividness and lucidity – they distort and deform it as well.

'I SEE A VOICE' teems with passion and patience, comedy and seriousness, sustained conceptual argument and diverting human anecdote. It is a new departure in philosophy, history, and a challenge of delights to its readers.

JONATHAN REE teaches philosophy at Middlesex University in London. Previous books include 'Proletarian Philosophers, Philosophical Tales' and 'Heidegger.'