Berryman, Sexton and the Possibilities of Poetic Language

This paper examines a select number of poems by Middle Generation poets John Berryman and Anne Sexton in relation to questions of death, silence and the task that literature sets itself as understood in key works by Blanchot, Heidegger, and Levinas. Rather than recourse to the overtrodden critical path of confessional interpretations of their work, this paper connects Berryman’s The Dream Songs (1969) and two Sexton poems (‘Oh’ and ‘The Silence’) to the philosophical determinations of what it is language can say and what demands literature makes of the writer prepared to risk their own being in answer to its call. Central issues such as suicide and the originating silence of the work of art are intricately interwoven with Berryman’s and Sexton’s work. Leaving aside their biographies, and by approaching suicide as a philosophical problem with which their poetry wrestles, a restructured approach to their work becomes available. The impulse to suicide and the mental processes involved in considering and committing the act are instincts and responses located within an individual’s own psychology. For these writers particularly such issues are sited within a philosophical debate about language, what it can and cannot represent. If poetry articulates language’s argument about its own capability, it is the ideal forum for philosophical confrontations with the possibilities of existence as represented by the grave decision to take one’s own life. © The Author 2013.

Constraining the time when language evolved

The precise timing of the emergence of language in human prehistory cannot be resolved. But the available evidence is sufficient to constrain it to some degree. This is a review and synthesis of the available evidence, leading to the conclusion that the time when speech in some form became important for our ancestors can be constrained to be not less than 400,000 years ago, thus excluding several popular theories involving a late transition to speech.

Language, Thought, Relativism, Nationalism: An Interdisciplinary Study

Ms. Neumer and her team began their project with a critical analysis of the various theories of the relationship between language and thought. Their aim was to develop a theoretical position concerning the issue of universalism versus relativism. This issue is closely bound up with one of the main questions of the history of East and Central Europe, namely, the question of the nation, and the possibility of mutual understanding between national cultures. The team attempted to avoid falling into an all-too-common trap, that of allowing a political perspective to obscure the central theoretical issues. In a project whose outcome totalled over 1000 pages of manuscript in German, English and Hungarian, they touched on cognitive psychological, linguistic, semiotic, socio-semiotic, and other such themes. Their experience has convinced them of the fruitful heuristic possibilities of the interaction of scientific and philosophical approaches in this area of research. A preliminary analysis of the history of philosophy and inquiries into conceptual fields revealed that, in order to reach strong relativist conclusions concerning the unity of thought and language, it is required to take as a point of departure the widest possible sense of these concepts. But in fact, such an option ends up refuting itself: pursuing the premises to their final conclusion one arrives at the restriction of relativism. The team outlined a theory of the understanding of the Other which, borrowing from analytical as well as continental-hermeneutic trends, does not underestimate, on the one hand, the difficulties of understanding between various forms of life, cultures, and languages, but, on the other hand, can provide an alternative solution to the theory of incommensurabiltiy. Within the boundary of this problematic the team studied the problems of translatability, the acquisition of the mother and foreign languages, and natural or cultural determinacy of kind terms. The team regards its most original contribution to be the association of the problem of relativism-universalism and the language-thought relation with contemporary investigations into the question of orality, literacy, and secondary orality. Their conclusion was that, although certain connections can be revealed both between forms of communication and the thesis of the unity of language and thought, and between periods in the history of communication and the predominance of relativistic or universalistic tendencies, forms of communication do not unequivocally determine the answers to these questions.

Later Wittgenstein's Anti-Philosophical Therapy

The object of this essay is to discuss Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks in Philosophical Investigations and elsewhere in the posthumously published writings concerning the role of therapy in relation to philosophy. Wittgenstein's reflections seem to suggest that there is a kind of philosophy or mode of investigation targeting the philosophical grammar of language uses that gratuitously give rise to philosophical problems, and produce in many thinkers philosophical anxieties for which the proper therapy is intended to offer relief. Two possible objectives of later Wittgensteinian therapy are proposed, for subjective psychological versus objective semantic symptoms of ailments that a therapy might address for the sake of relieving philosophical anxieties. The psychological in its most plausible form is rejected, leaving only the semantic. Semantic therapy in the sense defined and developed is more general and long-lasting, and more in the spirit of Wittgenstein's project on a variety of levels. A semantic approach treats language rather than the thinking, language-using subject as the patient needing therapy, and directs its attention to the treatment of problems in language and the conceptual framework a language game use expresses in its philosophical grammar, rather than to soothing unhappy or socially ill-adjusted individual psychologies.

The 'Philosophical paintings' of the Republic

En el presente artículo examino la apropiación platónica del lenguaje poético en República y sostengo que, a pesar de sus críticas a la poesía en los libros 3 y 10, el lenguaje poético está correctamente entrelazado dentro del tejido filosófico para pintar lo corrupto, lo feo y lo inmoral. En términos específicos, la adaptación platónica de diversos motivos poéticos e imágenes en República se vuelve más significativa si prestamos atención a Sócrates como un quasi-pintor en el diálogo e interpretamos sus imágenes filosóficas como una respuesta de la filosofía a las engañosas representaciones dramáticas de la poesía. De este modo, el arte de la pintura que, incluso es criticado en el libro 10 de República, en manos de Platón resulta una herramienta filosófica que le permite investigar la relación de nuestro mundo senso-perceptivo ordinario con el campo metafísico de las Ideas y el lugar de lo humano en él

The 'Philosophical paintings' of the Republic

En el presente artículo examino la apropiación platónica del lenguaje poético en República y sostengo que, a pesar de sus críticas a la poesía en los libros 3 y 10, el lenguaje poético está correctamente entrelazado dentro del tejido filosófico para pintar lo corrupto, lo feo y lo inmoral. En términos específicos, la adaptación platónica de diversos motivos poéticos e imágenes en República se vuelve más significativa si prestamos atención a Sócrates como un quasi-pintor en el diálogo e interpretamos sus imágenes filosóficas como una respuesta de la filosofía a las engañosas representaciones dramáticas de la poesía. De este modo, el arte de la pintura que, incluso es criticado en el libro 10 de República, en manos de Platón resulta una herramienta filosófica que le permite investigar la relación de nuestro mundo senso-perceptivo ordinario con el campo metafísico de las Ideas y el lugar de lo humano en él

The 'Philosophical paintings' of the Republic

En el presente artículo examino la apropiación platónica del lenguaje poético en República y sostengo que, a pesar de sus críticas a la poesía en los libros 3 y 10, el lenguaje poético está correctamente entrelazado dentro del tejido filosófico para pintar lo corrupto, lo feo y lo inmoral. En términos específicos, la adaptación platónica de diversos motivos poéticos e imágenes en República se vuelve más significativa si prestamos atención a Sócrates como un quasi-pintor en el diálogo e interpretamos sus imágenes filosóficas como una respuesta de la filosofía a las engañosas representaciones dramáticas de la poesía. De este modo, el arte de la pintura que, incluso es criticado en el libro 10 de República, en manos de Platón resulta una herramienta filosófica que le permite investigar la relación de nuestro mundo senso-perceptivo ordinario con el campo metafísico de las Ideas y el lugar de lo humano en él

English grammar in familiar lectures : accompanied by a compendium : embracing a new systematick order of parsing, a new system of punctuation, exercises in false syntax, and a system of philosophical grammar in notes : to which are added an appendix and a key to the exercises : designed for the use of schools and private learners /

Mode of access: Internet.

Hermes; or, A philosophical inqviry concerning vniversal grammar,

Mode of access: Internet.

English grammar in familiar lectures : accompanied by a compendium; embracing a new systematick order of parsing, a new system of punctuation, exercises in false syntax, and a system of philosophical grammar in notes: to which are added an appendix, and a key to the exercises: designed for the use of schools and private learners /

Mode of access: Internet.

English grammar in familiar lectures : embracing a new systematic order of parsing, a new system of punctuation, exercises in false syntax, and a system of philosophical grammar to which are added a compendium, an appendix, and a key to the exercises : designed for the use of schools and private learners /

Mode of access: Internet.