This book explores the narratives of today’s brand marketing and their influence on how we think about ourselves and our moral possibilities, our cultural ideas about morality, and our relations to each other.

Heraclitus stands in opposition to the general systematic tendency of philosophy in that he insisted that the contents of philosophy are such as to requireexpositional strategies whose goal it is to do something with and to the reader rather than merely say something. For him, the questions of philosophy and, indeed, the matters of the world such questions take up are not best approached by means of discursive propositions. His view of the relation of the structures of reality to the (...) structures of language requires procedures for understanding the world and talking about it that recognize and exploit the essentially riddle-like nature of both things and words. (shrink)

This essay addresses two central issues that continue to trouble interpretation of Zeno’s paradoxes: 1) their solution, and 2) their place in the history of philosophy. I offer an account of Zeno’s work as pointing to an inevitable paradox generated by our ways of thinking and speaking about things, especially about things as existing in the continua of space and time. In so doing, I connect Zeno’s arguments to Parmenides’ critique of “naming” in Fragment 8, an approach that I believe (...) adds considerably to our understanding of both Zeno’s puzzles and this enigmatic aspect of Parmenides’ thought. (shrink)