About the Book
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 so world-disclosive in such an automatic manner? In this fasincating 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 subordinated to a presentational account of immediate disclosure in concrete embodied life. The book critically addresses standard theories of language, such that standard questions in the philosophy of language are revised in a manner that avoids binary separations of language and world, speech and cognition, theory and practice, realism and idealism, internalism and externalism. The phenomenological analysis is also situated in child development, language acquisition, and the difference between oral and written forms of language.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Proto-Phenomenology and Language: A Summary of Volume I
1. Proto-Phenomenology and the Lived World
2. The Personal-World
3. The Environing-World
4. The Social-World
5. Projection
6. Temporality
7. Embodiment
8. Disclosure and Interpretation
9. Language
10. Truth and Pluralism
Chapter 2: The Child's World
1. Ecstatic Dwelling
2. The Personal-Social-World
3. The Environing-World
4. Affective Attunement
5. Projection
6. Temporality and History
7. Embodiment
8. On the Way to Language
Chapter 3: Language Acquisition
1. Natural Language
2. The Phenomenological Priority of Language
3. Language Learning and Dwelling
4. The Personal-Social-World
5. Embodiment and the Environing-World
6. Temporality and History
7. Differential Fitness, Development, and Truth
8. Summary
Chapter 4: Orality and Literacy
1. Oral and Written Language: Two Different Worlds?
2. The Alphabet and Learning How to Read and Write
3. Orality in Ancient Greece
4. Elements o
About the Author :
Lawrence J. Hatab is Louis I. Jaffe Professor of Philosophy at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (2008), Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms With Eternal Recurrence (2005), Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian Contributions to Moral Philosophy (2000), A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics (1995) and Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths (1990).
Review :
Written with elegance and ease, Lawrence J. Hatab's book argues that language is embedded in the lived world. Its thorough description of experiences that are not usually considered by philosophy adds a note of surprise. By the end of the book, the reader has gained valuable insights into child development, language acquisition, orality, and the emergence of literacy. This is phenomenological description at its best. Because it uses indicative and not technical concepts, the book can be read not only by experts in phenomenology but also by all those interested in the wonder of human language.
This book is a fitting and in many ways surprising completion of the first volume. Hatab's work on language and language acquisition is ground breaking. Influenced by but not subservient to Heidegger, Hatab takes phenomenology in new directions. This is not a book about phenomenology; it is doing phenomenology.
Philosophers who believe in the primacy of embodiment for how we experience the world have labored to ascertain how to make sense of our condition. To approach this question—Hatab asks how does meaning arise amongst humans who are not originally or only verbal, representational beings? Starting with our everyday manner of experiencing, this book is a compelling study of how his “proto-phenomenology” understands human meaning as naturally arising out of our lived condition in opposition to views that restrict meaning within the mental world.
This volume will be valuable as a stand-alone work for those interested in phenomenological methods, early cognitive development, primary language acquisition, and the cultural effects of widespread literacy.
This second volume of Lawrence J. Hatab’s Dwelling in Speech demonstrates the power of phenomenology to challenge both mainstream philosophy and the cognitive sciences which employ its metaphysical assumptions. … Hatab largely avoids Heideggerian terminology to make the work more accessible, developing his own lexicon which calls for some effort but rewards the reader with a wealth of insights into questions of philosophical and scientific import. … [I]n the two volumes of Dwelling in Speech, Lawrence Hatab has applied Heideggerian conceptions such as world disclosure and dwelling to a wide array of philosophical and empirical questions, thereby demonstrating the power of phenomenology to examine underlying metaphysical assumptions and recommend concrete research directions as a result. In particular, the notion of language as world disclosive is most powerful. We also see the richness of the lived world, which is what originally excited Heidegger about Husserl’s work. Hatab helps to bring that vision to fruition with this effort.
Lawrence J. Hatab’s Proto-Phenomenology, Language Acquisition, Orality and Literacy: Dwelling in Speech II aims to provide a (“proto-”) phenomenology of language acquisition and becoming-literate at both ontogenetic and cultural-historical scales of analysis. … Hatab’s goal in this work is to add to Heideggerian ontology a much-needed developmental dimension, one that renders explicit how it is that an individual comes to find herself dwelling in a meaningful world. … Hatab’s object is not only the world-building character of language, but also the specific effects of literacy for both children and entire cultures. … Dwelling in Speech II is part of the Rowman & Littlefield “New Heidegger Research” series. For Heideggerians new to 4E cognition, developmental psychology, and literacy studies, this book could be an effective entry into a burgeoning interdisciplinary field. And those already invested in such projects may find inspiration in Hatab’s general orientation and the scope of his project. Employing a phenomenological method while pairing ontogenetic and cultural-historical analyses of human development is a grand task, and we should welcome the attempt.
Proto-Phenomenology, Language Acquisition, Orality, and Literacy is a deeply valuable contribution to a number of fields, including, the philosophy of language, phenomenology, and social epistemology. It offers a fascinating account of two parallel developments – the development from childhood dwelling in speech to adult dwelling in speech and from oral culture to literate culture– that brings together two bodies of research rarely connected by scholars. More importantly, it serves to remind readers of the ways that even the sophisticated thought of highly literate people today remains bound to forms of linguistic disclosure that are rooted in earlier, more ecstatic stages of human life.
In an analysis that is engaging, bold, compelling, and conceptually compact, Hatab ventures into new phenomenological territory, that of child development and language acquisition, and he reminds us that abstract concepts can and should be traced back to the lived world from which they draw their representational force and power and that we should not cease these tracing endeavors because to live and speak with others, to dwell in a world with others, is what it means to be human.
