The Field of Language: Aron Gurwitsch and the Functional Analysis

Husserl Studies, 2001

RUDN Journal of Philosophy, 2011

Methodological issues of modern linguistic philosophy of consciousness are discussed in the article. A number of points of modern analytic philosophy of consciousness are considered and one can understand the whole complexity of the issue of correlation of mental and physical processes concerning the linguistic aspect. We pay much attention to the linguistic nature of intentionality and to the problem of reference; and we also describe intentional ambivalence of semiotisation of sensory experience.

2013

This article analyses Aron Gurwitsch’s conception of consciousness without the ego. Gurwitsch criticism of the pure ego reveals that a phenomenological reduction should be understood in a different way – the aim of reduction is not to reveal transcendental ego as the undeniable foundation, but rather to reveal the field of consciousness. On the one hand, when a phenomenological reduction is performed the act of consciousness should be understood only as a correlation between noema and noesis. A third component of the act as a pure ego which in Ideas I is understood as the center or a unifying entity is not allowed. On the other hand, any experience that implies indirect self-experience or thematic activity which is accompanied by a marginal selfawareness should be understood as a consciousness conceiving itself as self-consciousness. Thus marginal consciousness could be understood as a pre-reflective self-experience.First of all, the criticism of the pure ego is analyzed. The import...

History of Psychiatry, 2006

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the research on aphasia carried out by the linguist Roman Jakobson and the neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein. The linguistic theory of aphasia advocated by Jakobson in the 1950s and 1960s is based on clinical case studies reported by Goldstein at the beginning of the 1930s. However, Jakobson used Goldstein’s clinical observations without taking into account his theoretical work on language pathology. In particular, Jakobson fed the symptoms described by Goldstein into a structuralist model, allowing him to predict different types of aphasia deductively. Goldstein, however, saw the clinical manifestations of aphasia as a particular way of being in the world. By studying the changes associated with the patient’s reaction to the disease, Goldstein wanted to reach an understanding of language functioning in the normal subject. He distinguished between an instrumental use and a symbolic use of language, the latter mainly characteristic of lang...

Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy - Familiarity and Togetherness, 2022

This paper presents Aron Gurwitsch's phenomenological theory of organization, frst presented in the dissertation of 1929, Phenomenology of Thematics and of Pure Ego: Studies of the Relation between Gestalt theory and Phenomenology, and then developed in his major work of 1957, The feld of consciousness. Although I will refer to these two important works, I will focus my attention especially on another book, the habilitation thesis that was completed in 1933 but only posthumously published in 1977 with the title Human Encounters in the social world. In this book, Gurwitsch tries to apply his theory of the feld of consciousness to the domain of intersubjectivity and to the sphere of the social reality, undertaking some important refections on the notions of "familiarity" and "togetherness" which, as I tries to show, can play an important role both in the contemporary philosophical and scientifc debate and in the actual political context.

In this paper we intend to discuss, from different perspectives, the relationship between language and consciousness. The whole writing will be guided by a clear theoretical perspective, the perspective of Neural Darwinism. This guideline will emerge in a variety of considerations, both in the scientific evaluation of various deficiencies related to language and cognition in general, such as Williams Syndrome (SW) or deficits of the autistic spectrum, and in the logical and philosophical evaluation of some historical case such as Helen Keller, or person suffering from congenital insensitivity to pain. Our online guide will lead us to reduce language to its syntactic dimension, showing how the semantic dimension is not a feature of natural languages, but of consciousness, of which language is just one part among others. We want to show how the language is a system of keys to activate our multimodal memories and, therefore, remembrance is the origin of the cognitive dimension. We will support this theory taking into account the principles of neural Darwinism developed by Gerald M. Edelman (1978) and conclude the work with some philosophical and evolutionary considerations, claiming a historical and gradual evolution of language consequent to the final development of our vocal apparatus.

Language and Psychoanalysis, 2021

The significance of language in clinical practice first emerged with the Anna O. case, a study by Freud. Lacan went on to support Freud's findings. Through the Back to Freud movement, Lacan proved language to be crucial from theoretical and clinical perspectives. According to Lacan, the name of the father in the language used by the mother functions as a signifier for the mother's desire. It corresponds to the first repression and enters the symbolic register. It refers to Lacan's famous statement 'Unconscious is structured like a language'. As such, in his theory, Lacan actively uses the concepts of signifier, signified, metaphor and metonymy and offers new interpretations of these concepts. Therefore, to study the unconscious, working with language is the main method. However, because of repression, the unconscious can only be studied through the traces it shows in language. In this article, traces of the unconscious in language are explained using clinical examples. Clarifications are provided as to how traces of the unconscious can be studied analytically.

Husserl Studies, V. 17, 2001

Language and Psychoanalysis, 2021

The significance of language in clinical practice first emerged with the Anna O. case, a study by Freud. Lacan went on to support Freud’s findings. Through the Back to Freud movement, Lacan proved language to be crucial from theoretical and clinical perspectives. According to Lacan, the name of the father in the language used by the mother functions as a signifier for the mother’s desire. It corresponds to the first repression and enters the symbolic register. It refers to Lacan’s famous statement ‘Unconscious is structured like a language’. As such, in his theory, Lacan actively uses the concepts of signifier, signified, metaphor and metonymy and offers new interpretations of these concepts. Therefore, to study the unconscious, working with language is the main method. However, because of repression, the unconscious can only be studied through the traces it shows in language. In this article, traces of the unconscious in language are explained using clinical examples. Clarification...

In this superbly written essay, Francois Rastier, a distinguished French linguist with several books on interpretative semantics, questions the foundations of linguistics and cognitive science in order to investigate the role of semantics with respect to the other disciplines of this 'new' interdisciplinary science of cognition. The book is organized into three sections: the first, of 100 pages, considers the history and epistemology of cognitive science; the second, of particular relevance to computational linguists, studies in 60 pages the relationship between semantics and AI; and the last, of 70 pages, investigates the interactions between semantics on the one hand, and psychology and neurosciences on the other hand. Before developing these different studies, Rastier clearly states his positions in a 10-page introduction. In his opinion, "linguistics is a descriptive, partially predictive science [and] empirical rationalism 1 is the philosophical approach best suited to the theoretical activity of the linguist "2 (p. 12) for it can account for the multiplicity of determinations proper to linguistic objects such as texts. Only the dogmatic rationalist, guilty of unwarranted theoretical reductionism, searches for methodological universals "that he invents and reifies, admiring himself for their discovery" (p. 12). For Rastier, diversity, not unity, is taken to be the fundamental problem of linguistics. In particular, context, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, is taken to be an integral unpredictable component of comprehension, accounting for the multiplicity of interpretations. One may reduce context to a Montague-like index, but recognizing the existence of contextual variables says little about their instantiation. Consequently, for Rastier, "linguistic performance consists in adapting oneself to a situation whose parameters escape the computational paradigm" (p. 13). Linguistics is viewed as a subdiscipline of semiotics, a social science, concerned with actual tongues, 3 concrete linguistic communication, and cultures-three factors systematically downplayed, if not ignored, by cognitive science. This introduction sets the tone for the rest of the book and presents its two recurring themes: a systematic attack on universalism (its leaders and its philosophical underpinnings) and a strong argument in favor of the existence and autonomy of a semiotic level, which includes semantics, the world of the Saussurian signifid, distinct from the conceptual level. Section 1 starts with an investigation into the nature, history, and assumptions of cognitive science. According to Rastier, only the functionalist postulate, which assumes