This volume contains the proceedings of the six symposia of the 'Philosophers into Europe' conference held under the joint auspices of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and the British Society for Phenomenology at the University of Southampton in September 1969.

Frege and Husserl are traditionally regarded as the precursors of the linguistic turn; however, the importance of their ideas for this event still is not fully comprehended. This article contributes to such comprehension: the principles of the linguistic turn in its analytical interpretation provided by Rorty are applied as an indicator revealing the commonality and difference of Frege’s and Husserl’s positions regarding key issues of their concepts. The connection of the philosophers’ ideas with the linguistic turn is (...) viewed in the context of their interpretation of predicativity, propositionality, contextuality of meaning, and ways of categorization. The analysis conducted gives rise to distinguishing between Frege’s and Husserl’s referential schemes. It is based on the differences in the characteristics of the connection between perception and predication. In conclusion, the arguments against Frege’s and Husserl’s involvement in the linguistic turn are emphasized. These arguments stem from the idea of the primacy of sense over language fundamental for both philosophers who proceed from the fact that certain a priori logical relations underlie utterances or other acts. There is a more solid argument which does not allow considering Frege’s and Husserl’s legacies as its source. This argument consists in the fact that they regard sense as an objective, communicable, and universal phenomenon independent of its carriers, not inherently linguistic, and pre-logical which is due to its intentional nature according to Husserl and logical “indecomposability” of concepts according to Frege. (shrink)

This volume contains the proceedings of the six symposia of the 'Philosophers into Europe' conference held under the joint auspices of the Royal Institute of ...

This dissertation offers an account of linguistic practices of Latinx people in the United States through the lens of critical feminist phenomenology. It examines how Latinx people are racialized on the basis of their language use, the normative logics that structure those processes of racialization, and the practices by which Latinx people resist and transform those logics. In this project, I develop a critical feminist phenomenological approach that locates itself within a tradition of Latina feminist phenomenology—a tradition (...) that has prioritized the articulation of situated, embodied experiences of oppressing⇔resisting relations lived by Latinx intersubjectivities in the context of the United States. I propose the concept of “linguistic rupture” in order to name the specific kind of experience at the center of this analysis. The analysis allows for a reconceptualization of language and linguistic practices that constructs Latinx speakers as actively resistant rather than just passively oppressed. While I do argue that linguistic rupture is particularly significant in understanding the racialization of Latinx populations in the United States, the account of linguistic rupture developed in this project has potential for application across a broad range of racializing processes and events not limited to U.S. Latinx experience. It thus invites further examination and critical engagement with the various ways in which ruptures experienced by minoritized and marginalized subjects in general expose hegemonic logics operating in multiple directions, as well as the ways in which linguistic engagements specifically anchor embodied intersubjectivity existentially. (shrink)

Surprise is treated as an affect in Aristotelian philosophy as well as in Cartesian philosophy. In experimental psychology, surprise is considered to be an emotion. In phenomenology, it is only addressed indirectly (Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas), with the important exception of Ricoeur and Maldiney; it is reduced to a break in cognition by cognitivists (Dennett). Only recently was it broached in linguistics, with a focus on lexico-syntactic categories. As for the expression of surprise, it has been studied in connection with (...) evidentiality in languages that encode surprise morphosyntactically. However, how surprise is encoded in languages that lack an evidential morphosyntactic system has been largely unexplored. This book provides new insights into the dynamics of surprise based on a heuristic hypothesis tested against the investigation of time, language and emotion. It is intended to arouse the interest of a multidisciplinary audience keen on crossing the disciplinary borders of phenomenology, cognitive sciences, and pragmatics. The theoretical approaches adopted in this collection of articles rely on experiments and corpus data. They advance knowledge by building on robust empirical results coming from psychology, microphenomenology, linguistics and physiology. (shrink)

Although the semantic insights about natural language produced so far by neuroscientific research have been meagre, (Pulvermüller 2010) they have provided one important empirical finding which lang...

The influence of Husserlian phenomenology on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has been the subject of some analysis in the secondary literature, with scholars emphasizing both Gadame...

It is a commonplace that philosophical doctrines, like old soldiers, are not vanquished, but merely fade away. It might have been added that, like old soldiers, they occasionally return. What is sound in the commonplace, aside from whatever merit it may have as sociological comment, is found in its underscoring the peculiarities of philosophical refutation. Did Aristotle refute Plato? Did Ockham refute Scotus? Did Reid refute Locke? Did Moore refute Bradley? Did Strawson refute Russell? Part of what I wish to (...) show in this paper is that there are ways of posing questions like these so that they are at least answerable; it is not, however, so to pose them, much less to answer them. My chief concern is with the fact that one of the peculiarities of philosophical refutation is that it commonly contains a metaphilosophical component. Indeed, after considerable stage-setting, I shall argue that some important doctrines of Linguistic Analysts and Phenomenologists rest upon metaphilosophical mistakes and that, even where some of their doctrines are sound, the intellectual ambiance in which they are placed invites confusion. It is visionary to expect the ending of the intellectual embarrassment constituted by the coming and going of philosophical styles and fads; the attempt to expose metaphilosophical mistakes and confusions may, nevertheless, help to wither the exuberant cynicism of the commonplace. (shrink)

The present study pursues three objectives. First, to expose and discuss the contributions of the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset to the phenomenological study of gestures and emotive gesture. Secondly, to critically review one of the central theses defended by Ortega, according to which “every expressive phenomenon”—including, therefore, the emotive gesture—involves “a transposition, that is to say, an essential metaphor.” This thesis invites us, in the third objective, to establish a dialogue between phenomenology and cognitive linguistics (as developed by (...) Lakoff, Langacker and Talmy), assuming an experientialist position vis‐à‐vis human reason and language, in opposition to the objectivist and formalist position of Chomsky's generative linguistics. In this interdisciplinary context, we will study the phenomenon of emotive gesture, in particular the expression of the emotion of anger, as analyzed phenomenologically by Ortega y Gasset. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 559-572.

This book draws on recent developments in research on Ferdinand de Saussure's general linguistics to challenge the structuralist doctrine associated with the Course in General Linguistics and to propose a phenomenological interpretation of Saussure's study of language.

Stawarska considers the ambiguities surrounding the antagonism between the phenomenological and the structuralist traditions by pointing out that the supposed foundation of structuralism, the Course in General Linguistics, was ghostwritten posthumously by two editors who projected a dogmatic doctrine onto Saussure’s lectures, while the authentic materials related to Saussure’s linguistics are teeming with phenomenological references. She then narrows the focus to Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Saussure’s linguistics and argues that it offers an unusual, if not an uncanny, reading of the Course, (...) in that it identifies a phenomenological dimension within the text, against the grain of the dominant structuralist claim. This phenomenological dimension is corroborated by the authentic sources of Saussure’s linguistics, even though the latter were beyond the philosopher’s own power to know. Merleau-Ponty’s unorthodox reading of the Course as being broadly compatible with the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology has been dismissed as an error and a contresens , but Stawarska proposes that such deviant appropriations of foundational texts are the ones to cherish the most, since they effectively dismantle the received dogmas and official doctrines stuffing the cabinets of canonical philosophy. She argues specifically that Merleau-Ponty’s contested distinction between “a synchronic linguistics of speech ” and “a diachronic linguistics of language ” , which gives primacy to la parole over la langue, and raises the possibility of a systematic study of la parole, contains a more faithful response to Saussure’s own project than the received structuralist view that la langue alone constitutes the proper object of linguistic study. (shrink)

According to current cognitive linguistic theory, the abstract notion of TIME in many languages of the world is expressed through a metonymic relation involving direc-tion, irreversibility, continuity, segmentation, and measurability and one of two possible versions of the TIME AS ORIENTATION IN SPACE metaphor: either the observer moves or time does. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty argues for the possibility of understanding what he calls 'our primordial experience'of time through an exploration, analysis, comparison, and evaluation of the (...) different metaphors for time, not as they exist in themselves but as they are grounded in what other cognitive linguists have explored with respect to subjectivity, concept formation, and conceptual integration. This 'primordial experience' of time is possible because of the embodiment of ourselves in the world and gives rise to Merleau-Ponty’s theory of an ontology of the flesh; the fact that we are 'of' rather than 'in' the world gives rise to his theory of time as depth. In this paper, I show how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of time might 1) clarify the picture Lakoff and Johnson give of the existence of time and 2) provide a philosophical foundation that integrates various contemporary cognitive linguistic theories. (shrink)

Stawarska considers the ambiguities surrounding the antagonism between the phenomenological and the structuralist traditions by pointing out that the supposed foundation of structuralism, the Course in General Linguistics, was ghostwritten posthumously by two editors who projected a dogmatic doctrine onto Saussure’s lectures, while the authentic materials related to Saussure’s linguistics are teeming with phenomenological references. She then narrows the focus to Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Saussure’s linguistics and argues that it offers an unusual, if not an uncanny, reading of the Course, (...) in that it identifies a phenomenological dimension within the text, against the grain of the dominant structuralist claim. This phenomenological dimension is corroborated by the authentic sources of Saussure’s linguistics, even though the latter were beyond the philosopher’s own power to know. Merleau-Ponty’s unorthodox reading of the Course as being broadly compatible with the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology has been dismissed as an error and a contresens, but Stawarska proposes that such deviant appropriations of foundational texts are the ones to cherish the most, since they effectively dismantle the received dogmas and official doctrines stuffing the cabinets of canonical philosophy. She argues specifically that Merleau-Ponty’s contested distinction between “a synchronic linguistics of speech ” and “a diachronic linguistics of language ”, which gives primacy to la parole over la langue, and raises the possibility of a systematic study of la parole, contains a more faithful response to Saussure’s own project than the received structuralist view that la langue alone constitutes the proper object of linguistic study. (shrink)

The two eminent metaphysicians Armstrong and Grossmann exchanged letters for ten years in which they discussed crucial points of their respective ontologies. They have a common basis. Both do metaphysics proper and not linguistic philosophy. Both advocate universals and acknowledge the key position of the category of states of affairs. However, they differ on the simplicity of universals and the nature of states of affairs. There is also a fundamental methodological disagreement between them. Armstrong accepts only the evidence of (...) natural science and has a materialist view on mind while Grossmann is a dualist and grants also the same evidential status to the phenomenological data of perception and introspection. The letters are grouped into three phases. The first is the issue of universals, the second the ontological analysis of laws of nature and the third the ontology of numbers. The book contains also longer comments and reviews, partly not published until now. (shrink)

Cognitive phenomenology starts from something that has been obscured in much recent analytic philosophy: the fact that lived conscious experience isn’t just a matter of sensation or feeling, but is also cognitive in character, through and through. This is obviously true of ordinary human perceptual experience, and cognitive phenomenology is also concerned with something more exclusively cognitive, which we may call propositional meaning-experience: occurrent experience of linguistic representations as meaning something, for example, as this occurs in thinking (...) or reading or hearing others speak. One source of resistance to accepting this view has been a failure to distinguish sharply between cognitive content and cognitive-phenomenological content. (shrink)

In this paper we address the question of what determines the content of our conscious episodes of thinking, considering recent claims that phenomenal character individuates thought contents. We present one prominent way for defenders of phenomenal intentionality to develop that view and then examine ‘sensory inner speech views’, which provide an alternative way of accounting for thought-content determinacy. We argue that such views fare well with inner speech thinking but have problems accounting for unsymbolized thinking. Within this dialectic, we present (...) an account of the nature of unsymbolized thinking that accords with and can be seen as a continuation of the activity of inner speech, while offering a way of explaining thought-content determinacy in terms of linguistic structures and representations. (shrink)