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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
No One's Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming

No One's Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming

Heller-Roazen, Daniel

Hardcover

Philosophy

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1935408887
ISBN13: 9781935408888
Publisher: Zone Books
Published: Mar 21 2017
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.30
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.20
Language: English

Homer recounts how, trapped inside a monster's cave, with nothing but his wits, Ulysses once saved himself by twisting his name. He called himself Outis: No One or Non-One, No Man or Non-Man. The ploy was a success. He blinded his barbaric host and eluded him, becoming anonymous, for a while, even as he bore a name.

Philosophers never forgot the lesson that the ancient hero taught. From Aristotle and his commentators in Greek, Arabic, Latin, and more modern languages, from the masters of the medieval schools to Kant and his many successors, thinkers have exploited the possibilities of adding non- to the names of man.

Aristotle is the first to write of indefinite or infinite names, his example being non-man. Kant turns to such terms in his theory of the infinite judgment, illustrated by the sentence, The soul is non-_mortal. Such statements play unexpected and often major roles in the systems of Salomon Maimon, Hegel and Hermann Cohen, before being variously and profoundly reinterpreted in the twentieth century.

Reconstructing the adventures of a particle in philosophy, Heller-Roazen's book shows how a grammatical possibility can be an incitement for thought. Yet it also draws a lesson from persistent examples. The philosophers' infinite names all point to one subject: us. Non-man or soul, Spirit or the unconditioned, we are beings who name and name ourselves, bearing witness to the fact that we are, in every sense, unnamable.

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