Husserl's Phenomenology of Natural Language

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.

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