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

Description

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.

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

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 *