Weaving the Fish Basket: Heraclitus on the Relation of Word and World

Title

Weaving the Fish Basket: Heraclitus on the Relation of Word and World

Creator

Hopkins, Phil

Date

2014-09-02

Date Available

2014-09-02

Date Issued

2008

uri

http://collections.southwestern.edu/s/suscholar/item/6

Abstract

Heraclitus, by means of gnomic utterances and enigmatic expositional strategies offers a unique hetorical model of heuristic method. His approach to philosophy, therefore, is the first to be explicitly meta-philosophical. His refusal to separate his own ontological and epistemological investigations from questions concerning the proper means by which such contents can best be understood and expressed sets a precedent that finds important echoes in the history of our tradition. His view of the relation of the structures of reality to the structures of language, in which both are understood to be inherently paradoxical, requires procedures for understanding the world and talking about it that recognize and exploit the essentially riddle-like nature of both things and words. This paper examines several of the fragments that directly address these relations, and, in particular, the nature of riddles, in terms that stand as a singular articulation of order as deeply and paradoxically oppositional in nature. I argue that by paying attention to what Heraclitus does at least as much as to what he says, much still remains to be learned from this powerful and obscure thinker about possibilities for investigating and explicating the content matter of philosophy.

Language

English

Relation

Brown Working Papers in the Arts and Sciences;2008, no. 4

Subject

Heraclitus

Riddles

Meta-philosophy

Type

Working Paper