Life Lines: Quotations from the Work of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy - Softcover

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0912148160 ISBN 13: 9780912148168

Publisher: Argo Books, 1988

About this title

About the Author

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973) was a sociologist and social philosopher who, along with his close friend Franz Rosenzweig, and Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber, was a major exponent of speech thinking or dialogicism. The central insight of speech thinking is that speech or language is not merely, or even primarily, a descriptive act, but a responsive and creative act, which is the basis of our social existence. The greater part of Rosenstock-Huessy's work was devoted to demonstrating how speech/language, through its unpredictable fecundity, expands our powers and, through its inescapably historical forming character, also binds them. Born in Berlin, Germany into a non-observant Jewish family, he converted to Christianity in his late teens. He met and married Margrit Hüssy in 1914. Rosenstock-Huessy served as an officer in the German army during World War I. He then pursued an academic career in Germany as a specialist in medieval law, which was disrupted by the rise of Nazism. In 1933, after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he immigrated to the United States where he began a new academic career, initially at Harvard University and then at Dartmouth College, where he taught from 1935 to 1957.

Review

Rosenstock-Huessy continually astonishes one by his dazzling and unique insights.
--W. H. Auden

The historical nature of man is the aspect of reality about which we have been basically and emphatically instructed in the epoch of thought beginning with Hegel . . . Rosenstock-Huessy has concretized this teaching in so living a way as no other thinker before him has done.
--Martin Buber

Rosenstock-Huessy's thought is becoming more and more central to the theological conversation as the interest in secularization and the relationship of theology to secular categories continues to grow.
--Harvey G. Cox

Rosenstock-Huessy is an important thinker whose relevance to current philosophical and theological discussion is beyond doubt.
--Leslie Dewart

The sweeping historical insights of Rosenstock-Huessy are some of the sharpest and freshest our age has known.
--Walterj. Ong, SJ --Wipf and Stock Publishers

Edition details

• Publisher: Argo Books
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0912148160
• ISBN 13: 9780912148168
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 83
• Editor: Clinton Gardner