Adrian James Staples’ essay for the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, online in advance of the print edition.
Adrian James Staples – ‘The Derivativist Reading of Heidegger’s Remarks about Language in Being and Time: A Critique’: JBSP (Originally published online: 21 October 2020).
Abstract: Heidegger’s remarks about language in Being and Time do not constitute a comprehensive theory of language. Hubert Dreyfus, William Blattner and Mark Wrathall each propose a derivativist reading of these remarks. Derivativism is the theory that language is derivative of a pre-linguistically articulated experience of the world – but derivativism is not quite right. It does not account adequately for the relationship between the disclosedness of being-in-the-world and what Heidegger calls discourse [Rede]. I claim that although language has its ontological foundation in the constitution of disclosedness, this does not mean that language is prefigured by a way of being-in-the-world that is existentially prelinguistic. Finally, I develop Wrathall’s claims about disclosedness into a more palatable account of the relationship between discourse and language, which I test against Heidegger’s claims about the relationship between discourse and language in Being and Time.
Full article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2020.1833128
Adrian James Staples, Faculty of Law, The University of Tasmania, Tasmania, Australia
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