Signs, Intentionality, and Imaginability

Selected Papers
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-74125-6
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 3, 375 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm

Reihe: Semiotics, Signs of the Times

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ruthrof, Horst

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sprachphilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Sprachphilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophie: Allgemeines, Methoden
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Semiotik
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Semiotik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Horst Ruthrof FAHA, Ph.D. (1969) Rhodes University, is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and English at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. He has published over a hundred articles and seven books in literary theory, semiotics, and the philosophy of language.