Bøker av William Franke

This book offers a reading particularly of Part II of Don Quixote embedded in a philosophical reflection on the revelation of religious truth in and through literature. It absorbs and reconciles the religious reading of Miguel de Unamuno and the secular reading of José Ortega y Gasset, Spain's two outstanding philosophical luminaries. Both thinkers based their entire philosophies and their analyses of the Spanish national character and destiny on their interpretations of the Quixote. Negative theology deploys critical reason that is critical of reason itself and opens toward an unfathomable (un)ground of All. It performs a synthesis of the secularizing and sacralizing tendencies that are both sublimely operative in the text of the Quixote. It enables the Quixote to emerge in its fully parodic and paradoxical vitality, which other interpretations governed by one paradigm or the other can access only partially. Spanish baroque mysticism and contemporary post-secular thought are made to converge in highlighting the blessed, even sacred, donation that literature like Don Quixote preserves and transmits as our most precious and saving cultural heritage.

In A Philosophy of the Unsayable, William Franke argues that the encounter with what exceeds speech has become the crucial philosophical issue of our time. He proposes an original philosophy pivoting on analysis of the limits of language. The book also offers readings of literary texts as poetically performing the philosophical principles it expounds. Franke engages with philosophical theologies and philosophies of religion in the debate over negative theology and shows how apophaticism infiltrates the thinking even of those who attempt to deny or delimit it. In six cohesive essays, Franke explores fundamental aspects of unsayability. In the first and third essays, his philosophical argument is carried through with acute attention to modes of unsayability that are revealed best by literary works, particularly by negativities of poetic language in the oeuvres of Paul Celan and Edmond Jabes. Franke engages in critical discussion of apophatic currents of philosophy both ancient and modern, focusing on Hegel and French post-Hegelianism in his second essay and on Neoplatonism in his fourth essay. He treats Neoplatonic apophatics especially as found in Damascius and as illuminated by postmodern thought, particularly Jean-Luc Nancy's deconstruction of Christianity. In the last two essays, Franke treats the tension between two contemporary approaches to philosophy of religion-Radical Orthodoxy and radically secular or Death-of-God theologies. A Philosophy of the Unsayable will interest scholars and students of philosophy, literature, religion, and the humanities. This book develops Franke's explicit theory of unsayability, which is informed by his long-standing engagement with major representatives of apophatic thought in the Western tradition.

The comparison of current theoretical approaches to Dante, particularly those mobilizing the resources of theology, serves to adumbrate and illustrate, by application to Dante studies as a specific field of scholarship, the author¿s own philosophy of culture and the humanities

Modelling knowledge as revelation and theology as poetry, this powerful new reading of the Vita nuova not only challenges Dante scholars to reconsider the book's speculative emphases but also offers the general reader an accessible yet penetrating exploration of some of the Western tradition's most far-reaching ideas surrounding love and knowledge. Dante's 'little book', included in full here in an original parallel translation, captures in its first emergence the same revolutionary ferment that would later become manifest both in the larger oeuvre of this great European writer and in the literature of the entire Western canon. William Franke demonstrates how Dante's youthful poetic autobiography disrupts sectarian thinking and reconciles the seeming contraries of divine revelation and human invention, while also providing the means for understanding religious revelation in the Bible. Ultimately, this revolutionary unification of Scripture and poetry shows the intimate working of love at the source of inspired knowing.

An encounter between Franke's philosophy of the unsayable and Eastern apophatic wisdom in the domains of poetry, thought, and culture.

Branching out from his earlier works providing a history and a theory of apophatic thinking, William Franke's newest book pursues applications across a variety of communicative media, historical periods, geographical regions, and academic disciplines-moving from the literary humanities and cultural theory and politics to more empirical fields such as historical anthropology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science. On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking is an original philosophical reflection that shows how intransigent deadlocks debated in each of these arenas can be broken through thanks to the uncanny insights of apophatic vision. Leveraging Franke's distinctive method of philosophical, religious, and literary thinking and practice, On the Universality of What Is Not proposes a radically unsettling approach to answering (or suspending) perennial questions of philosophy and religion, as well as to dealing with some of our most pressing dilemmas at present at the university and in the socio-political sphere. In a style of exposition that is as lucid as it is poetic, deep-rooted tensions between alterity and equality in all these areas are exposed and transcended.

William Franke reads Dante's poetic language in the Paradiso in the light of contemporary critical theory by such thinkers as Derrida, Blanchot and Bataille.

Focuses on what is enduring and perennial rather than on what is accommodated to the agenda of the moment. William Franke's book offers re-actualized readings of representative texts from the Bible, Homer, and Virgil to Augustine and Dante. The selections are linked together in such a way as to propose a general interpretation of knowledge.

Apophasis has become a major topic in the humanities, particularly in philosophy, religion, and literature. This two-volume anthology gathers together most of the important historical works on apophaticism and illustrates the diverse trajectories of apophatic discourse in ancient, modern, and postmodern times.

Poetry and Apocalypse provides a theological reading of poetic language in the Christian epic tradition from the Bible and Dante to James Joyce and furnishes a critical negative theology of poetic language.