Phillip Stambovsky

As a contextual phenomenon, metaphor operates in fundamentally different ways in divergent universes of discourse. In historiography, Maurice Mandelbaum's incisive typology of forms of historical discourse affords a comprehensive conceptual basis for foregrounding the three fundamental ways that metaphor functions. Each of the three functions of metaphor facilitates historical understanding on a different epistemological level. Heuristic imagery advances deliberative, analytic understanding and falls within the domain of explanatory discourse. Depictive imagery presentationally facilitates the apprehension of meanings and occurrences; it is a component of narrative, which includes sequential, discourse. Finally, cognitive imagery, operative on the metahistorical plane, orchestrates interpretive discourse and thereby governs the way that events may be known in and of themselves

This paper considers how Kierkegaard self-reflexively portrays the tension between the boundary limit of discursive reason and mythic imagination in his classic analysis of Abrahamic faith. Following some reflections on the nature and philosophical implications of that tension, I examine its salient delineation in the Prelude of Fear and Trembling. Through four non-canonical renderings of the biblical Aqedah myth featured in the Prelude, Kierkegaard depicts the limits of ethical reasoning in the drama of Johannes de Silentio’s struggle to figure-forth Abraham’s “movements” in ethically intelligible terms. I conclude that, as dramatized by Kierkegaard, the tension between mythemic figuration and discursively articulated critical reasoning sets in relief one of the formative aporiai of modern Western culture, namely the conflictive interplay of vision and discourse.

In scholarly writing on metaphor, there is a great gap between literary theory and critical practice. Phillip Stambovsky here attempts to close that gap by presenting a theory of literary metaphor that is grounded in actual literary experience. Stambovsky begins by critically reviewing the most well-known and influential theories of metaphor, including those based on notions of comparison, substitution, transfer, analogy, semantic interaction, and context. He then introduces a phenomenology of literary experience, drawning from the writings of Whitehead, Cassirer, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Frye, among others. With this as his theoretical foundation, Stambovsky stresses the primacy of presentational awareness in literary experience, arguing for the reader's collaborative involvement in the creation of textual meaning. In the third chapter, Stambovsky examines how literary imagery functions in narrative discourse, showing how Henry James's imagery in The Golden Bowl depictively renders the relationships of characters, their thoughts, and their feelings so that the reader perceives them with the immediacy and aesthetic impact of perceptual, as opposed to conceptual, experience. Turning to the very concept of depictive imagery, Stambovsky next discusses experiential approaches to metaphor, particularly those of Marcus Hester and George Yoos. He concludes his study with an explication of a metaphor centered in the closing line of Dickinson's poem, "A Bird Came Down the Walk."

“Considered objectively, there can be only one human reason, there... can be only one true system of philosophy from principles, in however many different and even conflicting ways one has philosophized about the same proposition”—so declares Kant in the Vorrede to the “Doctrine of Right.” Kant makes this observation in the process of framing a striking claim: “prior to the development of critical philosophy there had been no philosophy at all.” Eckart Förster adduces this claim as a point of departure for undertaking “to grasp and understand the single [sic] thought” that orients his ambitious new study, Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. It is thus with reference to Kant’s pronouncement that Förster propounds his book’s lead thought, or at least the first part of it: “philosophy begins in 1781 and ends in 1806,” this in the sense that over those twenty-five years “philosophy became a science, thereby also arriving at knowledge of itself.” Förster sets himself the task of elucidating the “internal dynamic” of the “fundamental idea” that informs the philosophical-historical thesis to which he keys his investigation. The fundamental idea in question is the classic speculative problematic of objective knowledge, which in the Kantian context of Förster’s study takes the form of the issue of how it is that we know (discursively, intuitively) “the supersensible substrate of appearances.” Beyond simply anatomizing this issue, however, the author engages “to reproduce its immanent development,” systematically “reconstructing” it through interlinked analyses of seminal writings of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, and Hegel.

At defining junctures in their writings, philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Whitehead, Cassirer, and Heidegger demonstrate that they were keenly alive to the visionary authority of the work of artistic genius as an originally stimulus to the philosophical imagination. This book undertakes to make explicit that shared insight. The inquiry aims not only to demonstrate but also to engender in the reader a firsthand sense of the energizing and speculative value of intermediating conceptual engagements with the visionary "work" of poetic genius, what Heidegger called its "Werksein."

With its focus on the pathos of permanence versus temporality as human aporia and on the function — the Werksein — of the work of art genuinely encountered, John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn is a particularly compelling subject for philosophical analysis. The major explications of this most contentiously debated ode in the language have largely focused, however, on various combinations of the poem’s stylistic, structural, linguistic, psychological, aesthetic, historical, symbolic, and intellectual-biographical elements. My paper articulates a bona fide philosophical approach to the ode’s famously controversial fifth stanza. I demonstrate how William Desmond’s metaphysics of Being-specifically his analysis of the univocal, equivocal, dialectical, and metaxological senses of being-affords the groundwork for a "hermeneutics of the between" that elucidates the ode’s culminating stanza with all of the cogency and nuance that one would expect to derive from a systematic ontology.