Silvia Jonas, “Ineffability and Its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
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What historical philosophers are cited as early examples of the ineffable?
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talice, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview The interview is with Sylvia Donas, Polansky postdoctoral fellow at the Van Lear Institute and visiting researcher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her new book, Ineffability and its Metaphysics, is just out from Palgrave Macmillan. There's a long history in philosophy and art and religion of claims about the ineffable, from the Tao of Lao Tzu to the one in Platinus, to Kant's Numina or thing in itself, to Wittgenstein's famous remark at the end of the tractatus that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
But even if the ineffable cannot, in some sense, be expressed What can we say about what it is to be ineffable? What sorts of things are inexpressible, and what sense can be made of the claim that these things are inexpressible? In her new book, Jonas argues that there is no defensible sense in which there are ineffable objects, properties, propositions, or contents, but she does think that there are varieties of ineffable knowledge, and the core of these is the idea of a kind of knowledge based on acquaintance, and specifically self acquaintance. No Jonas's book brings together historical and contemporary claims about and concepts of the ineffable, and she provides a critique that will ground and inform philosophical discussion of the ineffable.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello Sylvia Jonas, are you there? Hello, Carrie. Yes, I
am here. Hi. Hi. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Thank you very much. And thank you very much for the invitation.
Uh I'm looking forward to our conversation about your your book, Ineffability and its metaphysics. Um It's a fascinating tour, you know, starting from a number of historical figures from Lao Tse to Plotinus to Kant to Wittgenstein and and of course many others, um about the concept of the ineffable and and what we c if even if there are things that we cannot of which we cannot speak Um maybe there's something we can still say about what it is that we can't speak, uh what it is to not to be able to to speak about something. Um so before we get into the actual text of the book, um why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, um, how you came to philosophy and then um how you came to write this book.
Um, well that's that's actually an interesting question, at least to me.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What historical philosophers are cited as early examples of the ineffable?
0:00–24:37
2
How does Sylvia Jonas explain her personal journey to the study of ineffability?
24:37–38:05
3
What are the paradigm cases of ineffability in art, religion, and philosophy?
38:05–1:10:23
4
How does Jonas distinguish ineffability from indescribability and unknowability?
1:10:23–1:12:58
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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