Silence

The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance

by Bernard P. Dauenhauer

Silence, as poets and thinkers in every age have realized, is not the mere absence of something else. It is a complex, positive phenomenon that occurs in language, in music, and in mime. Bernard P. Dauenhauer offers an original, comprehensive, and explicitly phenomenological analysis of silence in all its aspects. In the first part of the study the author describes the various kinds of silence, explores the relationship of silence to different types of discourse (political, artistic, moral, religious, and technological), and presents an intentional analysis, delimiting the essential characteristics of silence. Testing his insights against the thought of other philosophers who have considered the meaning of silence–notably Heidegger, Hegel, Husserl, Sartre, Derrida. and Merleau-Ponty–Dauenhauer, in the second part of the book, constructs an ontological interpretation of the signifi- cance of silence. The synthesis that emerges demonstrates the complexity of silence and its important role in a broadly conceived philosophy of language.

Metadata

  • isbn
    978-0-253-05124-0
  • publisher
    Indiana University Press
  • publisher place
    Bloomington, Indiana USA
  • restrictions
    CC-BY-NC-ND
  • rights
    Copyright © Trustees of Indiana University
  • rights holder
    Indiana University Press
  • rights territory
    World
  • doi