Becoming Human - The Development of Language, Self and Self-Consciousness (Electronic book text)

The main way-stations in our journey from ape to human are the coming to language, the development of self, and of self-consciousness. To know what it is to be a human we must come to understand those stages in our passage out of Eden. We must also consider the religious ideal of a return to Eden. This book deals with these issues in terms of a philosophical anthropology derived from the later writings of Wittgenstein. The result is an account of our place in nature consistent with both a hard-headed empiricism and a this-worldly but religiously significant mysticism.