Proto-Phenomenology, Language Acquisition, Orality and Literacy

How is it that sounds from the mouth or marks on a pagewhich by themselves are nothing like things or events in the worldcan 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.