David Wood (philosopher)
Professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University.
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To say that all philosophy is writing is, minimally, to say that it is never the transparent expression of thought.
To recognize a difficulty is not to solve it.
Dialogue never ends not for lack of time or opportunity but for essential reasons.
Nietzsche would say my friends lacked ears.
To understand how indirect communication is possible we must grasp what it is about ordinary communication that is being changed.
Nietzsche's problem is how to be a philosopher once he has grasped the finitude of philosophy.
The educated man is the man who does not live in immediate intuition, but in his recollection so that little is new to him any longer.
Like literature, philosophy is not distinguished from other subjects by a specific approach to a subject-matter independent of it. Chemistry deals with chemicals, biology with life and astronomy with very large, very distant objects. Philosophy can boast no such definite subject-matter.
Philosophy in its very act is a process of translation!
Language steps in where the angels of experience fear to tread.
Philosophy is an everlasting fire, sometimes damped down by setting itself limits, then flaring into new life as it consumes them. Every field of inquiry is limited, but philosophy has an essential relation to the question of limits, to its own limits.
We are passengers, comprehended and displaced by metaphor.
After Hegel, philosophy confronts the possibility of its own death, and in some sense has to do so if it is to remain the most fundamental kind of thinking.
What I would like to show is that there is a vital dimension of their writing, which I call performative reflexivity, which if ignored or misunderstood will impede an adequate response to it.
Philosophy is said to have taken the 'linguistic turn' in this century. One hundred years ago, a philosopher would think in terms of mind, spirit, experience, consciousness; now the by-word is language.
The point is that philosophy is seen to have come full circle, and to have exhausted itself.
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