This book intends to establish, against his numerous modern critics, that the ancient philosopher Parmenides was a mystic. Instead of arriving at his conclusions by cold reason, Parmenides found the unity of Being, which he called “the Truth,” by turning to a life of meditation.

A well-established tradition has argued that it is not legitimate to attribute to Parmenides a Fregean semantics, i.e. the distinction between ‘naming’ and ‘meaning’. Nonetheless, Parmenides claims more than once (B 8.53, B 9.1) that mortalsdo namereality, although incorrectly. As many scholars have emphasised, because it is fair neither to conclude that mortals’ names are ‘empty names’ nor dismiss Opinion's account (i.e., broadly speaking, the mortals’ account of reality) itself as meaningless, it seems that Parmenides is suggesting that some kind (...) of distinction between what names refer to and what names mean must be drawn. In view of this, what is Parmenides’ account of names?My suggestion is that in order to explain the Eleatic philosophy of language (and the Eleatic account of names) a step back is required. More specifically, Parmenides’ epistemology has to be taken into account. Indeed, if we assume that Parmenides is arguing for an ‘epistemological disjunctivism’ – such that the veridical and truthful state and the erroneous and deceptive state are essentially different – it will be clear that he is further arguing for what could be defined as a ‘semantic disjunctivism’, so that true speech and false speech are essentially different as well. (shrink)

THE CLAIM that even Plato could not say everything at once nor could have thought or worked out everything at once is, of course, a platitude. It is generally acknowledged that there is development in Plato's thought. But what the development is, is still a much fought-over question. For in spite of all scholarly efforts this intriguing question cannot be regarded as settled in a satisfactory way. This is due not only to the fact that we all look at Plato (...) through different eyes. There are just too many unknowns: We do not know when the dialogues were written nor in what order. We do not know what Plato himself regarded as the result of each of the dialogues nor how they are supposed to hang together. We do not know to what extent Plato himself is in agreement with what he lets Socrates say--or any of his partners. Nor do we always know what, precisely, the text itself says. And we do not know when Plato put the dialogues into the form in which they have come down to us. (shrink)

With the attempt to express my feeling of admiration for Hans-Georg Gadamer an ageless melancholy mingles. This melancholy begins as of the friends' lifetime. A cogito of the farewell signs the breathing of their dialogues. One of the two will have been doomed, from the beginning, to carry alone both the dialogue that he must pursue beyond the interruption, and the memory of the first interruption. To carry the world of the other, to carry both the other and his world, (...) the other and the world that have disappeared, in a world without world. That shall be one of the ways to let resound within ourselves the line of poetry by Paul Celan, " Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen .". (shrink)

Meditative poetry has the ability to reproduce aspects of the meditative experience. In this paper we explore this ability, trying to clarify the phenomenon by pointing out the cognitive processes involved. We focus on Christian Jesuit meditation and pinpoint one of its most effective elements: “the composition of place”. We argue that three main abilities associated with “the composition of place” are responsible for the meditative quality detected in poetic meditative texts: The text’s ability to evoke an orientation process; the (...) text’s ability to support diffuse perception and encourage divergent ways of processing; the text’s ability to generate the mental set required for this experience, the absence of purpose, and to supply the conditions that enable such a mental set to exist over time. We illustrate our theoretical discussion through a close reading of two meditative poetic masterpieces: Donne’s Holy Sonnet No. 7, and the Spanish anonymous sonnet “A Cristo Crucificado”. (shrink)

In the practical surmise of “writing” we encounter questions of scale and utility as a matter of course. Yet we do not generally treat it so, literature being an “escape,” historically speaking, fr...

This chapter explores the rather striking manner in which at key moments in the history of philosophy, in the discipline’s attempts at self-definition, the genre or literary form of poetry plays a key role. Philosophy, at these moments, has been defined, inter alia, as the enemy of poetry, the guiding light for the philosopher who can only try and inevitably fail to emulate its brilliance, or as the anomalous guest at the philosophical table with whom the host discipline has relations (...) which result in either generative or degenerative effects. Insofar as it lays claim to or liaises with philosophy – as we have come to know it today – poetry has thus played a part in the self-definition of genre theory. The aim of this chapter is to capture a very specific set of transfers, transpositions, metonymies and other modes of reversible relations of substitution and surrogacy between philosophy and poetry, and along the way between genre-theory-as-philosophy and poetry. (shrink)