Bøker av William Franke

While Covid-19 focused attention on the hope of finding a techn(olog)ical solution, this book asks: Is there a different kind of hope in what is not within our own means and methods, a hope that breaks us open beyond ourselves into relation with something other and absolute perhaps divine or real beyond our control and comprehension

This book offers a reading particularly of Part II of Don Quixote embedded in a philosophical reflection on the revelation of religious truth in and through literature. It absorbs and reconciles the religious reading of Miguel de Unamuno and the secular reading of José Ortega y Gasset, Spain's two outstanding philosophical luminaries. Both thinkers based their entire philosophies and their analyses of the Spanish national character and destiny on their interpretations of the Quixote. Negative theology deploys critical reason that is critical of reason itself and opens toward an unfathomable (un)ground of All. It performs a synthesis of the secularizing and sacralizing tendencies that are both sublimely operative in the text of the Quixote. It enables the Quixote to emerge in its fully parodic and paradoxical vitality, which other interpretations governed by one paradigm or the other can access only partially. Spanish baroque mysticism and contemporary post-secular thought are made to converge in highlighting the blessed, even sacred, donation that literature like Don Quixote preserves and transmits as our most precious and saving cultural heritage.

An encounter between Franke's philosophy of the unsayable and Eastern apophatic wisdom in the domains of poetry, thought, and culture.

Branching out from his earlier works providing a history and a theory of apophatic thinking, William Franke's newest book pursues applications across a variety of communicative media, historical periods, geographical regions, and academic disciplines-moving from the literary humanities and cultural theory and politics to more empirical fields such as historical anthropology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science. On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking is an original philosophical reflection that shows how intransigent deadlocks debated in each of these arenas can be broken through thanks to the uncanny insights of apophatic vision. Leveraging Franke's distinctive method of philosophical, religious, and literary thinking and practice, On the Universality of What Is Not proposes a radically unsettling approach to answering (or suspending) perennial questions of philosophy and religion, as well as to dealing with some of our most pressing dilemmas at present at the university and in the socio-political sphere. In a style of exposition that is as lucid as it is poetic, deep-rooted tensions between alterity and equality in all these areas are exposed and transcended.

In A Philosophy of the Unsayable, William Franke argues that the encounter with what exceeds speech has become the crucial philosophical issue of our time. He proposes an original philosophy pivoting on analysis of the limits of language. The book also offers readings of literary texts as poetically performing the philosophical principles it expounds. Franke engages with philosophical theologies and philosophies of religion in the debate over negative theology and shows how apophaticism infiltrates the thinking even of those who attempt to deny or delimit it. In six cohesive essays, Franke explores fundamental aspects of unsayability. In the first and third essays, his philosophical argument is carried through with acute attention to modes of unsayability that are revealed best by literary works, particularly by negativities of poetic language in the oeuvres of Paul Celan and Edmond Jabes. Franke engages in critical discussion of apophatic currents of philosophy both ancient and modern, focusing on Hegel and French post-Hegelianism in his second essay and on Neoplatonism in his fourth essay. He treats Neoplatonic apophatics especially as found in Damascius and as illuminated by postmodern thought, particularly Jean-Luc Nancy's deconstruction of Christianity. In the last two essays, Franke treats the tension between two contemporary approaches to philosophy of religion-Radical Orthodoxy and radically secular or Death-of-God theologies. A Philosophy of the Unsayable will interest scholars and students of philosophy, literature, religion, and the humanities. This book develops Franke's explicit theory of unsayability, which is informed by his long-standing engagement with major representatives of apophatic thought in the Western tradition.

Poetry and Apocalypse provides a theological reading of poetic language in the Christian epic tradition from the Bible and Dante to James Joyce and furnishes a critical negative theology of poetic language.

Apophasis has become a major topic in the humanities, particularly in philosophy, religion, and literature. This two-volume anthology gathers together most of the important historical works on apophaticism and illustrates the diverse trajectories of apophatic discourse in ancient, modern, and postmodern times.