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Timothy Cleveland, "Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable" (Lexington Books, 2022)
Timothy Cleveland, "Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable" (Lexington Books, 2022)
ratings:
Length:
58 minutes
Released:
Feb 10, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
It seems undeniable that language has limits in what it can express – among other philosophers, Wittgenstein famously drew a line of this sort in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But what is the unsayable or inexpressible? What is interesting, philosophically, about the unsayable? And if if something is unsayable, how can fictional works be related to (if not say something about) it?
In Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable (Lexington Books, 2022)), Timothy Cleveland argues that philosophical interest is not limited to the in-principle unsayable, as many philosophers claim: there is great value in what may be unsayable at a given time, due to epistemic limitations. Cleveland, who is professor of philosophy at New Mexico State University, defends a view in which words rendered in a certain way in fiction – such as in T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" – can acquaint us with, or exhibit to us, experiences that emerge from but are not semantically encoded in the sentences the works contain.
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In Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable (Lexington Books, 2022)), Timothy Cleveland argues that philosophical interest is not limited to the in-principle unsayable, as many philosophers claim: there is great value in what may be unsayable at a given time, due to epistemic limitations. Cleveland, who is professor of philosophy at New Mexico State University, defends a view in which words rendered in a certain way in fiction – such as in T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" – can acquaint us with, or exhibit to us, experiences that emerge from but are not semantically encoded in the sentences the works contain.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Released:
Feb 10, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Helen Steward, “A Metaphysics for Freedom” (Oxford UP, 2012): The basic problem of free will is quite simple to pose: do we ever act freely? One of the traditional “no” answers comes from the idea that we live in a deterministic universe, such that everything that happens had to happen given the initial condition... by New Books in Philosophy