Husserl's Phenomenology of Natural Language: Intersubjectivity and Communality in the Nachlass

by Horst Ruthrof

Overview

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. Ruthrof argues that it is the intersubjective character to linguistic meaning that is so emblematic of Husserl's position. Bringing his study up to the present day, Ruthrof discusses mental 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350230897
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	07/29/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	507 KB

About the Author

Horst Ruthrof is Emeritus Professor of English and Philosophy at Murdoch University, Western Australia, and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Preface

1. Introduction: Language and Intersubjective Intentionality

Part I Two Husserlian Points of Departure

2. Husserl's Philosophy of Language and Its Revisions
3. Language as Eidetic Reduction: The Fuzzy Eidos

Part II Intersubjective Intentionality in Language

4. Introjective Reciprocity: Meaning as Communal, Cognitive Event
5. From Husserl's Tone to Implicit Deixis
6. From Meaning Sufficiency to Communal Control
7. A Phenomenological Redefinition of Linguistic Meaning

Part III Implications for the Theorization of Language

8. Why Language Is Not Simply a “Symbolic” System
9. Displacement, Mental Time Travel, and Protosyntax
10. Conclusion: The Social Mode of Being of Language

References
Index

Editorial Reviews

Against the dominant focus on logical relations in Husserl's writings on language, one of the world's leading phenomenological philosophers here argues for a very different account grounded in bodily orientation and social interaction. This is a rigorous and innovative contribution to Husserl studies and the philosophy of language.” —John Frow, Professor of English, University of Sydney, Australia

“No mere exegetical exercise, Ruthrof's new volume draws on the full range of Husserl's writings, but especially the Nachlass, as the basis for an innovative and insightful account of language that gives a central role to the notion of imaginability at the same time as it also shows how such imaginability is itself bound up with the essentially social character of the linguistic.” —Jeff Malpas, Emeritus Distinguished Professor, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania

From the Publisher