Konturen: Vol 2 (2009)

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/23930
Between Nature and Culture: after the Continental-Analytic Divide

Is human language a natural phenomenon, or does a radically artificial language invent the human through the rupture it introduces in a natural totality to which it is heterogeneous? Both? Neither? What does twentieth century philosophy tell us? In this second Special Issue of Konturen we attempt to shed some light, in an array of specific discursive contexts, on the limits between nature and culture (or artifice)-- and on the place of language within this polarity-- in connection with the disjunction between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions.

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Browsing Konturen: Vol 2 (2009) by Author "Klebes, Martin"

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    If Worlds Were Stories
    (University of Oregon, 2009) Klebes, Martin
    The metaphysics of possible worlds proposed by the analytic philosopher David K. Lewis offers an account of fictional discourse according to which possible worlds described in fiction are just as real as the actual world. In an inspired reversal of the analysis of literary fictions by such philosophical means, the French poet Jacques Roubaud makes direct reference to Lewis’ controversial ontological picture in two cycles of elegies composed between 1986 and 1990. Roubaud’s poems take up the idea of possible worlds as real entities, and at the same time they challenge the notion that philosophy could offer an account of fiction in which the puzzling collision of the possible with the impossible that fundamentally characterizes the phenomenon of fictionality would be seamlessly unravelled. For Roubaud the lyrical genre of the elegy and its thematic concern with love and death stands as a prime indicator of the quandary that results from our inability to solve paradoxes of modality such as those raised by Lewis in strictly theoretical terms.