In Speech and Phenomena and other works, Derrida criticizes Husserl’s phenomenology and attempts to pave the way to his deconstructive philosophy. The starting point of his criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology is his assessment of the latter’s phenomenology of language developed in the Logical Investigations. Derrida claims that Husserl’s phenomenology of language in the Logical Investigations and the subsequent works is guided by the premise of the metaphysics of presence. The aim of this paper is (...) twofold: on the one hand, it aims to show that Derrida’s criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology of language is off the mark and, on the other hand, it aims to reveal that the phenomenology of language goes far beyond the scope of the Derridian deconstructive philosophy of language. (shrink)

In recent years there has been much productive interaction between phenomenological authors and work in (‘4e’) cognitive science emphasizing the embodied, embedded, enactive and extended nature of cognition. These interactions have centred on areas of interest common to phenomenology and philosophy of mind, such as embodiment or first-personal experience, with language receiving relatively little attention. This paper aims to broaden these interactions by showing how phenomenology of language complements systematic empirical theories in the 4e tradition. It (...) begins by outlining a phenomenological view of language and suggesting some differences between this and plausibly naturalizable nonextended mental states. I then argue that 4e cognitive science has a general need for phenomenology of language due to the central role it attributes to ‘scaffolds’, before highlighting more specifically how phenomenology provides an image of language better suited to 4e cognitive science than the ‘rules and representations’ model from which this distances itself. (shrink)

Language is indisputably in some sense a social phenomenon. But in which sense? Philosophical conceptions of language often assume a simple relationship between individual speakers and a language community, one of which is attributed primacy and used to understand the other. Having identified some problems faced by two such conceptions—social holism and individualism—this article outlines an alternative phenomenological view of shared language by focusing on two principal ways that language is shared. First, it draws on (...) the late Wittgenstein to characterize how shared practices ground linguistic communities. Based on the link between language-games and corresponding subcommunities of language users, I argue that pragmatic language sharing is more fragmented than social holism suggests but more cohesive than individualism intimates. Second, it considers how linguistic community is grounded in shared sign systems. Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Husserl’s notion of institution is used to highlight that existing linguistic structures are adopted in an open process that allows varying degrees of differentiation. Combining these two perspectives, I conclude that who we are in linguistic community with and how closely we converge varies over different parts of language. Our linguistic communities are thus complex in the sense of being fragmented, differentiated and nonuniform. (shrink)

Through accessible analyses of Merleau-Ponty’s views of linguistic expression and understanding, and by tracing the evolution of these views throughout the course of his philosophical career, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Language offers a comprehensive picture of his engagement with the philosophy of language.

In this book, Andrew Inkpin considers the disclosive function of language—what language does in revealing or disclosing the world. His approach to this question is a phenomenological one, centering on the need to accord with the various experiences speakers can have of language. With this aim in mind, he develops a phenomenological conception of language with important implications for both the philosophy of language and recent work in the embodied-embedded-enactive-extended tradition of cognitive science. -/- Inkpin (...) draws extensively on the work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, showing how their respective conceptions of language can be combined to complement each other within a unified view. From the early Heidegger, Inkpin extracts a basic framework for a phenomenological conception of language, comprising both a general picture of the role of language and a specific model of the function of words. Merleau-Ponty’s views are used to explicate the generic “pointing out”—or presentational—function of linguistic signs in more detail, while the late Wittgenstein is interpreted as providing versatile means to describe their many pragmatic uses. Having developed this unified phenomenological view, Inkpin explores its broader significance. He argues that it goes beyond the conventional realism/idealism opposition, that it challenges standard assumptions in mainstream post-Fregean philosophy of language, and that it makes a significant contribution not only to the philosophical understanding of language but also to 4e cognitive science. (shrink)

Taking as a starting point Taylor's concept about man as a being of meanings, this article examines, in particular, the way that Taylor elaborates his conception of the practical use of reason, recovering some fundamental notions of the phenomenological tradition and hermeneutics, relating to language, such as, the idea of the background, and the incarnated situation of man. Considering that, ultimately, the background is a horizon of previous reference, from the ontological point of view, to the subjective domain of (...) reason in the human agent, the analysis of Taylor ends up favoring certain approaches of contemporary philosophy such as, Heidegger’s existential analytic that aims at leaving aside, paradoxically, the premise of the subject. If we consider this indication, a challenge that remains, then, to the future development of the ways of understanding moral philosophy and philosophical anthropology, is how to link the analysis of the moral problem, in a subject of senses, with the ontological theory of the background that is, however, a-subjective. Tomando como punto de partida el concepto que tiene Taylor acerca del ser humano como un ser de significados, este artículo estudia el modo como Taylor elabora su concepción del uso práctico de la razón, recuperando ciertas nociones fundamentales de la tradición fenomenológica y hermenéutica relativas al lenguaje, como lo son la idea del trasfondo y la situación encarnada del hombre. Puesto que, en definitiva, el trasfondo constituye un horizonte de referencia anterior, desde el punto de vista ontológico, al dominio subjetivo de la razón en el agente humano, el análisis de Taylor termina por favorecer ciertos enfoques de la filosofía contemporánea como, por ejemplo, la analítica existenciaria de Heidegger, que buscan prescindir, paradójicamente, de la premisa del sujeto. Si atendemos a esta indicación, un desafío que resta, pues, al desarrollo futuro de los modos de comprensión de la filosofía moral, y de la antropología filosófica, es el de cómo vincular el análisis del problema moral, de un sujeto de sentidos, con una teoría ontológica del trasfondo que es, en cambio, a-subjetiva. (shrink)

This essay joins Wilhelm Dilthey’s conception of the metaphysical impulse as a flight from the tragedy of human finitude with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s understanding of how language bewitches intelligence. We contend that there are features of the phenomenology of language that play a constitutive and pervasive role in the formation of metaphysical illusion.

In the final years of his life, the Belgian phenomenologist Marc Richir started to question if philosophical writing would become pointless when artists, great poets for example, have already achieved so well what philosophers have always aspired to achieve. There is no doubt that Richir considers himself in alliance with artists, since he basically believes that “phenomenology is trying to say the same thing as poets or musicians, or even possibly painters, but with philosophical language”. He seems thereby (...) to imply that phenomenology is destined to become self-aware as a sort of art. There is no surprise in this regard if we notice how frequently, throughout his entire career of philosophical production, he employs the Kantian term of the sublime to express what constitutes the phenomenon as nothing but phenomenon. This article goes through his phenomenological interpretation of Kantian aesthetics, his elaboration of the affinity between phenomenology and art, and then his genealogical conception of art, in order to introduce an original thought on what he calls “the moment of the sublime”. (shrink)

Since Jackendoff has shown that language facilitates abstract and complex thought by making possible subtle manipulations of the focus of attention, and since the kind of attention relevant here is attention to aspects of intentional objects in conscious awareness, it follows that the abstract and complex thinking that language facilitates owes much to the working of a conscious process. This, however, conflicts with Jackendoff's view of consciousness as something which does not play a direct part in thinking, but (...) is only a byproduct of a non-conscious computational process in the brain which does the real thinking. I argue that, since Jackendoff s phenomenology of language shows that attention plays such an important part in thinking, yet language can help us attend only to what we are conscious of consciousness does play an important part in thinking. Moreover, consciousness cannot be merely an epiphenomenal byproduct separable in principle from underlying physical mechanisms, because this would imply that consciousness itself is not physical, which would lead to dualism. But if consciousness is inseparable from its physiological substratum, then it also causes whatever effects the physiological substratum causes. (shrink)

Transcendental Phenomenology of language wrestles with the relationship of language to mind’s manifestation of being. Of special interest is the sense in which language is, like one’s embodiment, a medium of manifestation. Not only does it permit sharing the world because words as worldly things embody meanings that can be the same for everyone; not only does speaking manifest to others the common world from the speaker’s perspective; but also speaking, as a meaning to say, may (...) achieve the manifestation of the world also for the speaker herself. This requires finding the right words to form true propositions in a well-formed sentences. The manifest telos of proposition-rendering sentences is adumbrated and founded in the infant’s elemental formation of simple phonemic identity syntheses and syntax. This instinctual dynamism is founded in what Husserl names “the idea of truth” which supports the thesis of a universal language instinct. (shrink)

This article seeks to reconstruct and critically extend Jacques Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Derrida’s critique of Husserl is explored in three main areas: the phenomenology of language, the phenomenology of time, and the phenomenological constitution of ideal objects. In each case, Husserl’s analysis is shown to rest upon a one-sided determination of truth in terms of presence—whether it be the presence of expressive meaning to consciousness, the self-presence of the temporal instant, or the (...) complete presence of an ideal object through intuition. At every juncture, Derrida’s reasoning is deployed in order to demonstrate how presence is irreducibly bound up with absence and otherness and thus how the ideal of a phenomenological self-presence of consciousness is itself an abstraction from the contingency of history and our concrete embeddedness within a particular lifeworld. The article concludes with an appraisal of reason’s limits in a time of technological domination and the threat of global annihilation. Rather than a flight into irrationalism or skepticism, the author advocates a deepening of philosophical responsibility and an ethics of undecidability as essential for meeting the challenges of modernity. (shrink)

Since Jackendoff has shown that language facilitates abstract and complex thought by making possible subtle manipulations of the focus of attention, and since the kind of attention relevant here is attention to aspects of intentional objects in conscious awareness, it follows that the abstract and complex thinking that language facilitates owes much to the working of a conscious process. This, however, conflicts with Jackendoff's view of consciousness as something which does not play a direct part in thinking, but (...) is only a byproduct of a non-conscious computational process in the brain which does the real thinking. I argue that, since Jackendoff s phenomenology of language shows that attention plays such an important part in thinking, yet language can help us attend only to what we are conscious of consciousness does play an important part in thinking. Moreover, consciousness cannot be merely an epiphenomenal byproduct separable in principle from underlying physical mechanisms, because this would imply that consciousness itself is not physical, which would lead to dualism. But if consciousness is inseparable from its physiological substratum, then it also causes whatever effects the physiological substratum causes. (shrink)

This book draws on recent developments in research on Ferdinand de Saussure's general linguistics to challenge the structuralist doctrine associated with the Course in General Linguistics and to propose a phenomenological interpretation of Saussure's study of language.

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's recognition of a prepersonal stage and dimension of our embodied experience to carry forward his phenomenology of language, this essay elaborates the significance of Merleau-Ponty's phrase "singing the world" and gives new inspiration to the metaphysical longing for a revelation of the "origin" of language, displacing this "origin" from its mythic sites to let it be heard within our experience of speaking. This experience is both diachronic (stages) and synchronic (structural dimensions): first, our prepersonal (...) attunement to the soundings in our auditory field; second, our experience of speaking the inherited language; third, a recuperation of that first communicative attunement. (shrink)

For most of us, learning to communicate is as effortless as breathing, and like air, communication skills are elemental; integral to our human existence in this world. Our communicative competencies might be seen as a bridge, facilitating our relationship with the world we are immersed in. But what happens when a child has difficulty learning to communicate effectively? What happens when their most basic messages of hunger or thirst fail to be understood or they are unable to jointly share in (...) everyday experiences of curiosity, joy, frustration, or anger? In these situations, it is the role of the Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) to span the distance between a child and their family, a child and the world, building a route for life experiences and understandings to cross over. An SLP often begins with assessment and after a brief interaction, an SLP may come to a ‘naming’ such as delay or disorder. While the caring professional may intend this naming to be helpful in better understanding a child or facilitating access to valuable support, this naming may also place an immeasurable weight upon the child and their family. The act of naming is therefore an ethical concern. Through observation and interviews, this paper presentation explores SLP’s experiences of coming to a diagnosis through the human lens of phenomenological inquiry. It seeks to enhance thoughtful and conscientious practice by considering the ‘ethical experience of caring responsibility’ as applied to SLP (van Manen, 2016). (shrink)

Horst Ruthrof revisits Husserl's phenomenology of language and highlights his late writings as essential to understanding the full range of his ideas. Focusing on the idea of language as imaginable as well as the role of a speech community in constituting it, Ruthrof provides a powerful re-assessment of his methodological phenomenology. From the Logical Investigations to untranslated portions of his Nachlass, Ruthrof charts all the developments and amendments in his theorizations. Instead of emphasising the definition and (...) meaning of words, Husserl's later writings point to the variation produced by a community of speakers in the act of communicating. Essential to this linguistic meaning is the intersubjective character that Ruthrof argues is so emblematic of Husserl's position. Using his concepts of intimation, introjection, reciprocity, and voice further outlines a theory that is intersubjective and communal. Bringing his study up to the present day, Ruthrof discusses metal time travel, the evolution of language, and protosyntax in the context of Husserl's late writings, progressing a comprehensive new phenomenological ontology of language with wide-ranging implications for philosophy, linguistics, and cultural studies. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the performative character of fictional language. While assuming that all speaking is a form of acting, it aims to shed light on the nature of fictional, and particularly literary, speech acts. To this aim, relevant input can be found in the discussion of the ontological status of fictional entities and of their constitution and in the inquiry into the interaction between author and receiver of a fictional work. Based on the critical assessment of different approaches (...) in the debate on speech-act theory and literary fiction, the article first clarifies why the study of the performative character of fictional language cannot be reduced to either the discussion of the status of singular speech acts in the fiction or the inquiry into the pretend or unserious nature of fictional speech acts formulated by an author. While referring to Roman Ingarden’s, Jean-Paul Sartre’s, and Wolfgang Iser’s work, it subsequently argues that such a performative character should be understood as a specific serious affordance—or appeal—to imagine and thus to participate in the constitution of the fictional world. (shrink)

How is it that sounds from the mouth or marks on a page—which by themselves are nothing like things or events in the world—can be world-disclosive in an automatic manner? In this fascinating and important book, Lawrence J. Hatab presents a new vocabulary for Heidegger’s early phenomenology of being-in-the-world and applies it to the question of language. He takes language to be a mode of dwelling, in which there is an immediate, direct disclosure of meanings, and sketches (...) an extensive picture of proto-phenomenology, how it revises the posture of philosophy, and how this posture applies to the nature of language. Representational theories are not rejected but subordinated to a presentational account of immediate disclosure in concrete embodied life. The book critically addresses standard theories of language, such that typical questions in the philosophy of language are revised in a manner that avoids binary separations of language and world, speech and cognition, theory and practise, realism and idealism, internalism and externalism. (shrink)

The article analyzes the phenomenology of language developed by Levinas in his second major work, Otherwise than Being, where language is described not as the opposition of two different kind of languages, but as the original ambiguity of the two dimensions of the same language: the phenomenological/ ontological Said and the ethical Saying. Levinas criticize the phenomenological Said, identified with the designative function of language, for acting, by the sense-giving of an originally linguistic intentionality, as (...) a logical-eidetical idealization of the phenomena. To the ambiguity of the predicative proposition corresponds, on the one hand, the Heideggerian ontological difference between being and entities, reinterpreted by Levinas as the amphibology of the verb and the name, and on the other hand, the fact that the ethical difference is revealed through the ontological. Finally, the response of the responsibility , is analyzed both as the inversion of the husserlian egology of the meaning by a responsive heterology, and – from the aspect of the diachronical temporality – as a passive response to an an-archic appeal coming from a past who was never present, response which also accomplish the linguistic singularisation of the subject. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking (...) over spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)

Resumo: O problema da intersubjetividade, tal como colocado pela filosofia da consciência, exigiu de Merleau-Ponty uma investigação de alguns aspectos essenciais envolvidos no fenômeno da comunicação, tais como o valor expressivo da palavra e a questão da verdade, o que acabou por inserir o filósofo no cenário das grandes discussões linguísticas. Pelo aprofundamento especulativo em direção à camada pré-reflexiva da existência, a análise da linguagem e da intersubjetividade favoreceram não apenas a compreensão da questão da criação de novos significados: ela (...) também possibilitou uma autêntica experiência de comunicação. Foi pela realização desse estudo que o filósofo radicalizou seu pensamento em direção a uma ontologia indireta, afastando-se da noção de cogito tácito como condição de possibilidade da experiência intersubjetiva. O objetivo desse artigo é acompanhar esse percurso realizado por Merleau-Ponty na década de 1950, a fim de evidenciar a relação entre o fenômeno da criação no domínio da linguagem e a possibilidade da experiência intersubjetiva. Palavras-chave: criação; intersubjetividade; linguagem; verdade. (shrink)

There are two dominant contradictory approaches towards understanding the nature of language: one, the epistemological approach; two, the ontological approach. The epistemological approach understands language as a mere tool and denies the close relationship between a word and the actual thing for which that word stands. The ontological approach, on the other hand, understands language as the disclosure of world experience and professes a close relationship between a word and the thing it signifies. However, this approach opposes (...) the epistemological approach towards the understanding of language. In this article, we propose that Hegel, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, depicts an interesting relationship between language and spirit which points towards the consistency between the two contradictory approaches towards the nature of language. For Hegel, language not only plays a role in spirit’s pursuit of self-knowledge which signifies the epistemological approach, but also in spirit’s existence which signifies the ontological approach. Thus, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the epistemological approach and the ontological approach towards the nature of language coexist. In this article, by turning to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and through an analysis of the relationship between language and spirit, we not only attempt to seek some resolution to the epistemology-ontology contradiction, but we also reveal the homogeneity of language and spirit, which we take as the true nature of language in Hegel’s philosophy. (shrink)

One of the central debates in current analytic philosophy of time is whether time consists only of relations of simultaneity, earlier and later (B-relations), or whether it also consists of properties of futurity, presentness and pastness (A-properties). If time consists only of B-relations, then all temporal determinations are permanent; if at anyone time it is the case that birth is later than Homer's birth, then it is ever after the case that Dante's birth is later than Homer's. The temporal position (...) of Dante's birth vis a vis Homer's is permanently fixed. Moreover, if B-relations are the only temporal determinations possessed by events, then each event, regardless of when it occurs, is equally as real as each other event. Each event sustains B-relations to other events, and thus in respect of its temporal determinations is ontologically undistinguished from each other event. Why should Dante's birth be "more real" than Homer's just because it is later than it? But if time also consists of A-properties, then some events are ontologically distinguished by virtue of their temporal determinations; the events that are or exist in the tensed sense, the events that possess the A-property of present- ness, have a reality not possessed by other events. All other events are no longer (are past) or are not yet (are future), and in this respect are deprived of the being, the presentness, possessed by the events that are. The A-properties possessed by events are impermanent temporal determinations; if an event possesses a certain A-property at one time, then there is another time at which the event will not have that A-property but some other A-property instead. First an event is future, then it is present, and finally it is past. This shows that the issue between the defenders of the B-theory and the defenders of the A-theory is of fundamental ontological importance. But analytic philosophers discuss this issue ,almost exclusively in terms of the language we use to describe the temporal determinations of events. They engage in what Quine calls "semantic ascent", i.e., redirecting their concern from the "things themselves" to the words we use to describe things. Defenders of the A-theory argue that tensed sentences and their tokens, sentences containing tensed copulas like "is", "was" and "will be" and adverbs like "now" and "at present", are untranslatable or unanalyzable into tenseless sentences about B- related events, and therefore that the tensed copulas and ad- verbs refer to A-properties of events. Defenders of the B-theory argue that tensed sentences or their tokens are translatable or analyzable into tenseless sentences about B-related events, and hence that the tensed sentences or tokens refer only to B-related events. While this semantic ascent is not without its advantages, it seems to me that additional light can be thrown on this subject if it is approached from a nonlinguistic phenomenological perspective. This approach is all the more needed since this particular issue in the philosophy of time has not been explicitly addressed by any of the practitioners of "phenomenology" (in the wide sense), such as Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty .Indeed, phenomenologists have generally seemed to be unaware of the debate between the A-theorists and B-theorists. This issue has been a concern exclusively of analytic philosophers (with the exception perhaps of the early 20th century British Idealist John McTaggart.) In this paper, I will point to a number of phenomenological facts that are pertinent to the debate. These facts all favor the A-theory. I shall make the case that the basic phenomenological truths about time simply cannot be accounted for by the B-theory . (shrink)

This dissertation seeks to explicate the fundamental contributions of phenomenology to the philosophy of language as it is presently conceived in the Anglo-American tradition for which John Searle serves as the representative. They are the essence of language in the later essays of Martin Heidegger and the perspicacious description of the experience of speaking in Maurice Merleau-Ponty. ;After roughly describing the subjectivistic assumptions, the questions, and the goals of the philosophy of language in the works of (...) Searle, the study proceeds to explore how phenomenology's characteristic search for essences and concern for lived-experience can set it on a more circumspect path. ;The study elicits the following conclusions. Despite significant contrasts, there is a solid complementarity between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as phenomenologists concerned with the language phenomenon. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty make substantial contributions to the philosophy of language. Specifically, its traditional subjectivistic assumptions are phenomenologically re-thought; answers to its customary questions are formulated from a pre-subjective and pre-objective perspective; and the traditional problem of how language and speaking can be creative is resolved. Finally, some of the concerns of a complete philosophy of language left unaddressed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are itemized. (shrink)

The field of enquiry into the phenomenon of language has long been dominated by the Computational-Representational (C-R) theories of language. This seems to be the most natural and plausible state of affairs, given the revolutionary impact that the advent of computers and the emergence of information technology have had in our lives lately. Noam Chomsky’s variant has been the most influential among such theories. However, there are certain conceptual issues pertaining to the very method, object and modality of (...) the Chomskyan project. In the present paper, I will try to locate these issues and contend that they arise from the peculiar conception of human embodiment involved in the propositions forming the Chomskyan scheme of language. They come to light only when engaged closely with from a phenomenological viewpoint. And this will be done in the first part. Once this is done, I will propose an alternative approach towards language, contained in the phenomenological insights on human embodiment and perception of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau Ponty. I will also hint at how befitting this alternative scheme is to the connectionist-neural network models of language, which are fast replacing the C–R models lately. (shrink)

This book draws connections between recent advances in analytic philosophy of mind and insights from the rich phenomenological tradition concerning the nature of thinking. By combining both analytic and continental approaches, the volume arrives at a more comprehensive understanding of the mental process of "thinking" and the experience and manipulation of objects of thought. Contributors scrutinize aspects of thinking that have a common grounding in both the phenomenological and analytic tradition: perception, language, logic, embodiment and situatedness due to individual (...) history or current experience. This collection serves to broaden and enrich the current debate over "cognitive phenomenology," and lays the foundations for further dialogue between analytic and continental approaches to the phenomenal character of thinking. (shrink)

Already in his 1913 Ideen I, Husserl claimed that there are two types of intuition: experiencing, that is, sense, intuition and ideal intuition. The former provides us with contingent facts, whereas the latter provides essences. Commenting on this dichotomy in his own book-length work, Appearance and Sense, published in 1914, Shpet believed Husserl had overlooked an important and distinct type of phenomenon that we call “social” and thereby omitted a corresponding third type of intuition that reveals the social function or (...) purpose of a thing. This oversight on Husserl’s part led him to claim that an “I,” or ego, stood behind or possessed the human individual’s consciousness. Husserl failed to notice that we can and do meaningfully speak of a social consciousness that, as such, belongs to no single individual. Apart from the “evidence” of ordinary language, Husserl’s strict dichotomy leaves unaddressed how we can proceed from external appearances to their understanding, which cognitively is always in terms of concepts, traditionally called “universals.” That is, we frame our experiences and express them verbally, the words employed being meaningful to us and hopefully to “the other.” Realizing the problem of transiting from the intuition of the contingent to that of the ideal, Shpet in early 1917 downplayed the difference, preferring to call them different degrees of seeing with different conscious attitudes. He called the conscious “seeing” associated with an understanding of words “intelligible intuition.” With an interest in historical methodology predating his acquaintance with phenomenology, Shpet recognized that the only tool available to the historian is the words appearing on documents, which serve as signs. How we understand these signs forms the study of hermeneutics, which functions as the epistemology of history. However, the fear remains that if we conceive the understanding of signs and “intelligible intuition” subjectively, we lapse into a psychologism. We must not forget the social origin of language, that language is no more the possession of an individual than is consciousness. The sense of words is established in an intersubjective context. Thus, Shpet turned to a study of language much as he had previously turned to consciousness and saw neither as subjective. (shrink)

Publisher's description: The Phenomenology of Religious Life presents the text of Heidegger's important 1920621 lectures on religion. First published in 1995 as volume 60 of the Gesamtausgabe, the work reveals a young Heidegger searching for the striking language that eventually formed the mature expression of his thought. The volume consists of the famous lecture course "Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion," a course on "Augustine and Neoplatonism," and notes for a course on "The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval (...) Mysticism" that was never delivered. Heidegger's engagements with Aristotle, St. Paul, Augustine, and Luther give readers a sense of what phenomenology would come to mean in his later works. Here, Heidegger reveals an impressive display of theological knowledge, protecting Christian life experience from Greek philosophy and defending Paul against Nietzsche. The appearance of this first English translation marks a significant event in Heidegger scholarship and affords a unique look into his phenomenology. (shrink)

Working within the tradition of continental philosophy, this article argues in favour of a phenomenological understanding of language as a crucial component of bioethical inquiry. The authors challenge the ‘commonsense’ view of language, in which thinking appears as prior to speaking, and speech the straightforward vehicle of pre-existing thoughts. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1908–1961) phenomenology of language, the authors claim that thinking takes place in and through the spoken word, in and through embodied language. This (...) view resituates bioethics as a matter of bodies that speak. It also refigures the meaning of ethical self-reflexion, and in so doing offers an alternative view on reflexivity and critique. Referring to the Kantian critical tradition and its reception by Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, we advance a position we call ‘critical ethical reflexivity’. We contend that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of language offers valuable insight into ethical reflexivity and subject formation. Moreover, his understanding of language may foster new qualitative empirical research in bioethics, lead to more nuanced methods for interpreting personal narratives, and promote critical self-reflexion as necessary for bioethical inquiry. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Hegel's Linguistic Inheritance Hegel's Early View of Language in the Jena Period (1804–1806) Language in the Jena Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Language in Hegel's ‘Mature System’ ( The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences ) (1818–1830) The Philosophy of Language: The Unwritten Volume.