Proto-Phenomenology, Language Acquisition, Orality and Literacy

Through his innovative study of language, noted Heidegger scholar Lawrence Hatab offers a proto-phenomenological account of the lived world, the "first" world of factical life, where pre-reflective, immediate disclosiveness precedes and makes possible representational models of language. Common distinctions between mind and world, fact and value, cognition and affect miss the meaning-laden dimension of embodied, practical existence, where language and life are a matter of "dwelling in speech." In this second volume, Hatab supplements and fortifies his initial analysis by offering a detailed treatment of child development and language acquisition, which exhibit a proto-phenomenological world in the making. He then takes up an in-depth study of the differences between oral and written language (particularly in the ancient Greek world) and how the history of alphabetic literacy shows why Western philosophy came to emphasize objective, representational models of cognition and language, which conceal and pass over the presentational domain of dwelling in speech. Such a study offers significant new angles on the nature of philosophy and language.

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).

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