Full Description
This book contains essays by Horst Ruthrof, tracing the author's intellectual history from his encounter with literature to his critique of the philosophy of language. If you have ever felt that our linguistic and philosophical approaches to language lack an explanation of what renders it so powerful, you share the author's motivation for writing these essays.
With tools from Locke, Kant, Peirce, and especially Husserl, the author redefines natural language as "a set of social instructions for schematically imagining, and acting in, a world" and gradually identifies what grants natural language its power: imaginability.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Original Publications
Introduction: from Literary Theory to the Critique of Language Philosophy
Part 1
Signs in Literary Theory
Introduction to Part 1
1 Reading the Signs of Literary Works
2 Signs in Translation
3 Motivated Signifieds: the Fourth Critique
4 The Role of Imaginability in Literary Semantics
Part 2
Intentionality in Peircean Semiotics
Introduction to Part 2
5 How to Get the Body Back into the Linguistic Sign
6 Intentionality as Sufficient Semiosis
7 Signs of Resemblance: Hypoiconicity as Intentionality
Part 3
Locke, Kant, Heidegger, Einstein and Freud
Introduction to Part 3
8 The Logos of Modernity: Vernunftspaltung
9 From Kant's Monogram to Conceptual Blending
10 Locke: Linguistic Meaning as Indirectly Public
11 Missing Signs: Heidegger's Forgetting of Perception
12 Signs of Irrationality: Einstein and Freud on Why War?
Part 4
Imaginable Signs in the Phenomenology of Language
Introduction to Part 4
13 Speculations on the Origins of Linguistic Signification
14 Knowing a Language: What Sort of Knowing Is It?
15 Perception or Imaginability: Which Has Primacy in Language?
16 On Sign Compulsion in Natural Language
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
