Husserl's Logical Investigations: The Phenomenological Revolution

Abstract

The view that language is a vehicle for the communication of (immaterial) "concepts," in opposition with the (physical) "words" that carry them, is the foundation of Western philosophy of language, and perhaps the foundation of Western philosophy in general. As Edmund Husserl and Jacques Derrida confront this relationship between ideality and reality in language, the old order promulgating this binary comes into question. The following essay explores this challenge to the traditional account of language as well as its wider implications for ontology and subjectivity.