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Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
The Poststructuralist Broom Of Wallace’S System: A Conversation Between Wittgenstein And Derrida, Vernon W. Cisney
The Poststructuralist Broom Of Wallace’S System: A Conversation Between Wittgenstein And Derrida, Vernon W. Cisney
Philosophy Faculty Publications
David Foster Wallace famously characterized his first novel, The Broom of the System, as ‘a conversation between [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and [Jacques] Derrida.’ This comes as little surprise, given the ubiquity of the question of language in the works of these two thinkers, and given the novel’s constant reflections on the relation between language and world. Broom’s protagonist, Lenore Beadsmen – in search of her eponymous great-grandmother – is preoccupied with the dread that ‘all that really exists of [her] life is what can be said about it,’ that is to say, that reality is entirely coextensive with language. …
Reflections On Reading Plato And Aristotle At Lancaster, Daniel R. Denicola
Reflections On Reading Plato And Aristotle At Lancaster, Daniel R. Denicola
Philosophy Faculty Publications
While serving as a Visiting Fellow at Lancaster University, I was asked to lead an informal seminar on Classical Philosophy. It was to be a reading group of postgraduate students and staff, focusing on two foundational texts of Western civilization: Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. I happily accepted. The resulting two-hour, weekly sessions over Michaelmas Term were lively times of philosophical effervescence, full of probative questions, interesting interpretations, diverse evaluations, vigorous debates, and shared insights. Postmodernists engaged in the holy act of Interpreting the Text, we nonetheless strained to grasp the “true meaning” of the texts, to extend our …