"The steeds that bear me carried me as far as ever my heart
Desired, since they brought me and set me on the renowned
Way of the goddess"
Someone is showing up, he starts speaking, and after a short time the listeners understand: this is a philosopher. How is this happening? Why do they listen?
The philosopher is, so the definitions we usually get, talking about very general questions: about being, the good, about present, future and past as such ... but why? Will he be telling something the others do not know? Because he has followed, as Parmenides states, "the ways of the goddess"?
The philosopher is, so the definitions we usually get, talking about very general questions: about being, the good, about present, future and past as such ... but why? Will he be telling something the others do not know? Because he has followed, as Parmenides states, "the ways of the goddess"?
We remember Pythagoras behind his drape mumbling the truth. Why does it seem plausible that he is sitting behind, we are sitting in front of the cloth, and only he knows the truth? There is, as the Italian philosopher Carlo Sini has illustrated, a threshold between the supposed-to-be philosopher and us, the listeners. How does he create this distance between him and us?
The philosopher has to trigger in his listeners what Coleridge called the suspension of disbelief.
This can partially be done by position: a university teacher, a messenger of institutionalized knowledge, the one who passed many exams and selections, is supposed to be the one who knows. But philosophical knowledge is of a special kind. One might even question the right of university professors to talk about truth...
It has to be explained where the philosophical text comes from. That is what, after the titles on the cover, prefaces do. Philosophically, though, these texts are supposed to treat the particular, the circumstances, everything irrelevant to the philosophical text in itself. What Genette described as paratexts, are impossible and necessary additions to the work of a philosopher. A brief look at writings of Wolff, Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Husserl seems to be interesting at that regard, at least to me.
Thesis: The difference between a novel and a philosophical work is that the latter needs a preface.
It has to be explained where the philosophical text comes from. That is what, after the titles on the cover, prefaces do. Philosophically, though, these texts are supposed to treat the particular, the circumstances, everything irrelevant to the philosophical text in itself. What Genette described as paratexts, are impossible and necessary additions to the work of a philosopher. A brief look at writings of Wolff, Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Husserl seems to be interesting at that regard, at least to me.
Thesis: The difference between a novel and a philosophical work is that the latter needs a preface.
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