Research Catalog

No one's ways : an essay on infinite naming

Title
No one's ways : an essay on infinite naming / Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Author
Heller-Roazen, Daniel
Publication
  • New York : Zone Books, 2017.
  • Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : Distributed by the MIT Press

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TextUse in library JFE 17-3944Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315

Details

Description
335 pages : illustrations; 23 cm
Summary
Homer recounts how, trapped inside a monster's cave with nothing but his wits, Ulysses once saved himself by twisting his name. Odysseus called himself Outis: "no one," "no man," or, to force a translation, "not-" or "non-one." The ploy was a success. He blinded his barbaric host and eluded him, and in doing so became anonymous, at least for a while, even as he bore a name. This act illustrates a fundamental rule of language. Every time the particle "non-" is attached to a word, a single event in speech may be discerned: a term is denied, and its denotations are suppressed. In that refusal, a realm of meaning is disclosed: one that has no positive designation, although it is delimited. To exhaust this undefined expanse, one would need to traverse the entire domain of signification that a given expression implicitly excludes. Perhaps a god could do it. But in the non-man's cave, as at the hero's telling, no god is present. The thinkers who came after Odysseus did not forget the lesson that he taught. From Aristotle and his commentators in Greek, Arabic, Latin, and more modern languages, from the masters of the medieval schools and their early modern successors to Kant, Schelling, Hegel and those who came after them, philosophers have been drawn to the possibility that the seafarer laid bare. This book, then, reconstructs the adventures of a particle in philosophy. Yet its aims are not solely historical. It also seeks to show how, in its equivocations, a possibility of grammar can be an incitement to thinking. Speaking without being aware of the rules by which we speak, reasoning in our mother tongues without reflecting on the logic and illogic that they imply, we can draw on a faculty that is obscure to us, without examining it as such. 0.
Subject
  • Onomasiology
  • Names
  • Semantics
  • Ontology
  • Language and languages > Philosophy
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents
A guest's gift -- In the voice -- Square necessities -- Varieties of indefiniteness -- An imported irregularity -- Ways of indeterminacy -- From empty words -- Toward the object in general -- The infinite judgment -- Zero logic -- Non-I and I -- Collapsing sentences -- The springboard principle -- After the judgment -- A persistent particle -- Callings.
Call Number
JFE 17-3944
ISBN
  • 9781935408888
  • 1935408887
LCCN
2016043303
OCLC
958796639
Author
Heller-Roazen, Daniel, author.
Title
No one's ways : an essay on infinite naming / Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Publisher
New York : Zone Books, 2017.
Distributor
Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : Distributed by the MIT Press
Type of Content
text
Type of Medium
unmediated
Type of Carrier
volume
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Research Call Number
JFE 17-3944
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