Borges And Plato

This comparative approach shows how the Platonic viewpoint sheds new light on Borges' essayistic and fictional work. Analyses to which extent his thought is deeply rooted in classical philosophical doctrines.

In Rethinking Philosophy with Borges, Zambrano, Paz, and Plato, Hugo Moreno argues that in Ficciones, Claros del bosque, and El mono gramático, Jorge Luis Borges, María Zambrano, and Octavio Paz practice a literary way of philosophizing—a way of seeking and communicating knowledge of reality that takes up analogical procedures. They deploy analogy as an indispensable and irreplaceable heuristic tool and literary device to convey their insight and perplexities on the nature of existence. Borges’ ironic approach involves reading and writing philosophy as fiction. Zambrano’s poetic reason is a mode of writing and thinking based on an imaginative sort of recollection that is ultimately a visionary’s poetizing technique. Paz’s poetic thinking relies on analogy to correlate and harmonize an array of worldviews, ideas, and discourses. In the appendix, Moreno shows that Plato's Republic is a forerunner of this way of philosophizing in literature. Moreno suggests that in the Republic, Plato reconciles philosophy and poetry and creates a rational prose poetry that fuses argumentation and narration, dialectical and analogical reasoning, and abstract concepts and poetic images.

Cover -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part I: Philosophical Inquisitions -- Chapter 1: Labyrinthal Paradigms: Western Philosophy in Borges' Oeuvre -- Chapter 2: Literary Philosophers: Mythos and Logos in Borges and Plato -- Chapter 3: Philosophy and Ideology: Dialectical Orientalism in Borges' Writings -- Part II: Comparative Perspectives -- Chapter 4: Borges and Schopenhauer: Microcosms and Aesthetic Observation -- Chapter 5: Borges, Heraclitus, and the River of Time -- Chapter 6: A View from Eternity: The Archetypal Quest -- Chapter 7: Borges and Levinas Face to Face: Writing and the Riddle of Subjectivity -- Chapter 8: Narrative Aspect Change and Alternating Systems of Justice: A Wittgensteinian Reading of Borges -- Chapter 9: Borges, Wittgenstein, and Kierkegaard on the Boundaries of Language: Mystical Silence and Indirect Communication -- Chapter 10: Borges and Berkeley: Idealism and the Ontology of the Fantastical Object -- Bibliography -- Index of Names -- Index of Subjects

"In the first book devoted to the impact made by Borges on the contemporary aesthetic imagination, Aizenberg brings together specially commissioned essays from international scholars in a variety of disciplines to provide a wide-ranging assessment of Borges's influence on the fiction, literary theory, and arts of our time."--Publishers website.

Jorge Luis Borges is acknowledged as one of the great Spanish writers of the twentieth century. On the broader literary scene, he is recognized as a modern master. His fascination with philosophy - especially metaphysics - sets him apart from his contemporaries. Borges appreciated and formulated rigorous philosophical arguments, but also possessed the unique ability to present the most abstract ideas imaginatively in metaphors and symbols. Borges wandered among the great masters seeking a firm purchase that he could not find, and therefore expressed a nostalgia for metaphysics as he lost himself in his labyrinths. Borges and Philosophy traces Borges' philosophical concerns in his tales, essays, and poems and argues that despite his apparent skepticism in philosophical matters, a careful reading of Borges' texts reveals a coherent philosophical path that underlies his work.

This edited collection investigates the kinds of philosophical reflection we can undertake in the imaginative worlds of literature. Opening with a look into the relations between philosophical thought and literary interpretation, the volume proceeds through absorbing discussions of the ways we can see life through the lens of literature, the relations between philosophical saying and literary showing, and some ways we can see the literary past philosophically and assess its significance for the present. Taken as a whole, the volume shows how imagined contexts can be a source of knowledge, a source of conceptual clarification, and a source of insight and understanding. And because philosophical thinking is undertaken, after all, in words, a heightened sensitivity to the precise employments of our words – particularly philosophically central words such as truth, reality, perception, knowledge, selfhood, illusion, understanding, falsehood – can bring a clarity and a refreshed sense of the life that our words take on in fully-described contexts of usage. And in these imagined contexts we can also see more acutely and deeply into the meaning of words about words – metaphor and figurative tropes, verbal coherence, intelligibility, implication, sense, and indeed the word “meaning” itself. Moving from a philosophical issue into a literary world in which the central concepts of that issue are in play can thus enrich our comprehension of those concepts and, in the strongest cases, substantively change the way we see them. With a combination of conceptual acuity and literary sensitivity, this volume maps out some of the territory that philosophical reflection and literary engagement share.

A history of ancient literary culture told through the quantitative facts of canon, geography, and scale.

Fully conversant with the critical issues of the current cultural debates, Djelal Kadir goes to great pains to articulate and exercise the scruples with which critical reading and cultured scrutiny might proceed without unduly compromising otherness or capitulating the congeniality of reading and writing as civilizing activities.