An examination of the role of ostension—the bodily manifestation of intention—-in word learning, and an investigation of the philosophical puzzles it poses. Ostension is bodily movement that manifests our engagement with things, whether we wish it to or not. Gestures, glances, facial expressions: all betray our interest in something. Ostension enables our first word learning, providing infants with a prelinguistic way to grasp the meaning of words. Ostension is philosophically puzzling; it cuts across domains seemingly unbridgeable—public–private, inner–outer, mind–body. In this book, Chad Engelland offers a philosophical investigation of ostension and its role in word learning by infants. Engelland discusses ostension (distinguishing it from ostensive definition) in contemporary philosophy, examining accounts by Quine, Davidson, and Gadamer, and he explores relevant empirical findings in psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and neuroscience. He offers original studies of four representative historical thinkers whose work enriches the understanding of ostension: Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Augustine, and Aristotle. And, building on these philosophical and empirical foundations, Engelland offers a meticulous analysis of the philosophical issues raised by ostension. He examines the phenomenological problem of whether embodied intentions are manifest or inferred; the problem of what concept of mind allows ostensive cues to be intersubjectively available; the epistemological problem of how ostensive cues, notoriously ambiguous, can be correctly understood; and the metaphysical problem of the ultimate status of the key terms in his argument: animate movement, language, and mind. Finally, he argues for the centrality of manifestation in philosophy. Taking ostension seriously, he proposes, has far-reaching implications for thinking about language and the practice of philosophy.

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In the confusion and lack of discipline in today's "thinking," one needs an almost scholastic formulation of its ways in the shape of characterized "questions."-MARTIN HEIDEGGER 1In the last decade, Steve Crowell, Daniel Dahlstrom, Jeff Malpas, and others have given much attention to the transcendental motif in Heidegger. 2 They focus on the transcendental as what is most fruitful in his thought. While their work is dogged by Heidegger's own later criticisms of transcendental thinking, several features of this reading are worth highlighting.First, Being and Time, in which species of transcendental thinking proliferate, figures prominently as their point of departure; for these scholars, it is a work of continued relevance.Second, Heidegger's transcendental thinking engages other philosophical traditions; for them, he still has something to say within the conversation that is philosophy, for he does not simply bypass or reject its history. Third, the seminal insight of Heidegger's transcendental approach is the "space," "disclosedness," or "topos" of meaning and being. Some want to see the persistence of the transcendental motif in his later thinking, despite his protests. For the transcendental motif, Kant naturally suggests himself as the nodal point for the inquiry.Independent of the transcendental motif, Thomas Sheehan has attempted a demystification of Heidegger's lasting topic, the Seinsfrage, in order to institute a new paradigm in Heidegger research geared to the matter itself. Aristotle's understanding of psyche as "a paschein ti, a transcendental openness-to-receive" provides the inspiration for this approach. 3 Sheehan applies what he calls "Heidegger's razor" to the Contributions and indeed Heidegger's thinking as a whole. The razor says, with Heidegger, that the multiplication of names does not undermine the simplicity of the matter or its questioning. Hence, Sheehan attempts to "demystify" Heidegger by tracing back the "apocalyptic language" of the esoteric writings to the demystified topic, namely, "the openness opened up by our essential finitude." 4 Sheehan formulates Heidegger's fundamental question as follows: "What is responsible for the correlation between an entity's givenness and the dative of that givenness?" 5 The published investigations of Being and Time, then, are preparatory. They display on the one hand the phenomenological interpretation of being as givenness and on the other the dative of that givenness as the open comportment called Dasein. 6 Heidegger's fundamental question concerns the reciprocal relation of the two.The transcendental approach rightly keeps to the domain disclosed in Being and Time, but it does not fully clarify how the transcendental motif, which becomes the subject of Heidegger's criticism, is related to his later thinking. In the introduction to Transcendental Heidegger, Crowell and Malpas observe that "while the idea of the transcendental is explicitly disavowed in Heidegger's later thought, there still seems to be an important sense (thought one 2

Phenomenologists turn to Augustine to remedy the neglect of life, love, and language in the Cartesian cogito: (1) concerning life, Edmund Husserl appropriates Augustine’s analysis of distentio animi, Edith Stein of vivo, and Hannah Arendt of initium; (2) concerning love, Max Scheler appropriates Augustine’s analysis of ordo amoris, Martin Heidegger of curare, and Dietrich von Hildebrand of affectiones; (3) concerning language, Ludwig Wittgenstein appropriates Augustine’s analysis of ostendere, Hans-Georg Gadamer of verbum cordis, and Jean-Luc Marion of confessio. Phenomenology’s non-Cartesian Augustinianism can tell us something about phenomenology, namely that it is engaged in the project of recontextualizing the cogito, and something about Augustine, namely how radically different his project is than Descartes’s. Phenomenology presents an Augustine that is well positioned for the debates of our times concerning mind and world, desire and the human person, and language and embodiment.