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28Nothingness and the aspiration to universality in the poetic ‘making’ of sense: an essay in comparative east–west poeticsAsian Philosophy 26 (3): 241-264. 2016.ABSTRACTAs a contribution to comparative East-West poetics, this essay descries a common resource of Western and classical Chinese literatures in certain “apophatic” modes of thought and discourse that are oriented to what cannot be said, to what is manifest only in and through a certain evasion and defiance of all efforts to verbalize and conceptualize it. This argument is developed in critical counterpoint with the work of interpreting Chinese classical poetry and thought by the French philoso…Read more
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92Apophasis and the turn of philosophy to religion: From Neoplatonic negative theology to postmodern negation of theologyInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 60 (1-3): 61-76. 2007.This essay represents part of an effort to rewrite the history metaphysics in terms of what philosophy never said, nor could say. It works from the Neoplatonic commentary tradition on Plato's Parmenides as the matrix for a distinctively apophatic thinking that takes the truth of metaphysical doctrines as something other than anything that can be logically articulated. It focuses on Damascius in the 5—6th century AD as the culmination of this tradition in the ancient world and emphasizes that Neo…Read more
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51The Place of the Proper Name in the Topographies of the ParadisoSpeculum 87 (4): 1089-1124. 2012.There is an obvious paradox in any attempt to map the topography of Paradise, for Paradise, theologians assure us, is outside of space as well as time. Yet mapping Paradise is what Dante's poem, the Paradiso, attempts to do. For the two preceding realms of the afterlife, hell and purgatory, Dante provides numerous finely articulated descriptions of rigorously ordered regions. And again for Paradise, the variegated states of the souls making up the spiritual order of the realm are expressed very …Read more
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24Acknowledging Unknowing: Stanley Cavell and the Philosophical Criticism of LiteraturePhilosophy and Literature 39 (1): 248-258. 2015.
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12On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts: Volume 1: Classic Formulations (edited book)University of Notre Dame Press. 2007.“Any writer worth his salt knows that what cannot be spoken is ultimately the thing worth speaking about; yet most often this humbling awareness is unsaid or covered up. There are some who have made it their business, however, to court failure and acknowledge defeat, to explore the impasse of words before silence. William Franke has created an anthology of such explorations, undertaken in poetry and prose, that stretches from Plato to the present. Whether the subject of discourse is All or Nothi…Read more
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35Apophasis as the common root of radically secular and radically orthodox theologiesInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 73 (1): 57-76. 2013.On the one hand, we find secularized approaches to theology stemming from the Death of God movement of the 1960s, particularly as pursued by North American religious thinkers such as Thomas J.J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, Charles Winquist, Carl Raschke, Robert Scharlemann, and others, who stress that the possibilities for theological discourse are fundamentally altered by the new conditions of our contemporary world. Our world today, in their view, is constituted wholly on a plane of immanence, to…Read more
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268Varieties and valences of unsayabilityPhilosophy and Literature 29 (2): 489-497. 2005.Examples of unsayability of the most disparate sorts are cited from literature (Shakespeare, Melville, James, Aeschylus, and others) in order to suggest the uncircumscribable diversity of motives for unsayability. The question is whether they all have anything in common. When something cannot be said because of politeness or obscenity or deceit or strategy, does this have anything to do with the metaphysical motives for unsayability? These things are not per se unsayable but only conditionall…Read more
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137Dante's inferno as poetic revelation of prophetic truthPhilosophy and Literature 33 (2). 2009.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dante's Inferno as Poetic Revelation of Prophetic TruthWilliam FrankeIDante's Inferno demands to be understood as the culmination of a series of visits to the underworld in ancient epic tradition. Dante's most direct precedent is Aeneas's journey to meet his father in Hades, as told by Virgil in Book VI of the Aeneid. Aeneas's voyage is modeled in turn on Odysseus's encounter with shades of Hades in Book XI of the Odyssey. The epic q…Read more
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Vanderbilt UniversityProfessor
Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Philosophical Traditions |