Timothy Cleveland, "Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable" (Lexington Books, 2022)
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What is the main focus of Timothy Cleveland’s book *Beyond Words*?
Welcome to the new books network.
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. And I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Timothy Cleveland, professor of philosophy at New Mexico State University. His new book Beyond Words Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable is just out from Roman and Littlefield. It seems undeniable that language has limits in what it can express. Among other philosophers, Wittgenstein famously drew a line of this sort.
In his tractatus logico philosophica But what is the unsayable or inexpressible? What is interesting philosophically about the unsayable? And if something is unsayable, how can fictional works be related to, if not say something about it? In his new book, Cleveland argues that philosophical interest is not limited to the in principle unsayable, as many philosophers have claimed. There's great value in what may be unsayable at a given time due to epistemic limitations, for example. Moreover, words rendered in a certain way in fiction, such as in T S Elliot's The Wasteland, can acquaint us with or exhibit to us experiences that emerge from but are not semantically encoded in the sentences that the works contain.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Timothy Cleveland. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Hi Carrie. I'm um happy to be here.
Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to talking about your book, Beyond Words, Philosophy Fiction. And the unsayable. Um, before we get into the book itself, maybe you can tell us a bit about yourself, you know, your your philosophical career and then, you know, your philosophical interests and how that all culminated in this book.
Sure. Um I grew up as a uh kid in West Texas in a Evangelical Christian Family and culture. And um By that time I was probably In my let go. I was starting to question that and be uncomfortable with it and uh so by the time I went to college I took couple of philosophy classes and That sort of became my new faith and the idea was, you know, for the first time It you know, philosophy was presented to me as a way of critically reflecting on your beliefs and putting them to the scrutiny of reason and trying to find reasons that would justify the y the best reasons you could use to justify and support you know, a world view and I had a sort of great face in that. Um, that sort of replaced my old faith and um this faith that reason could lend us knowledge and insight.
But I also I went to school to be a writer. And a poet, um And my first love was really literature, and it was that that took me to philosophy classes uh f originally. But um so I had these two loves, philosophy and literature, and I had to make a choice and of course I ended up choosing professionally to go into philosophy, but I I've always felt like Um I wanted these two things to be one in my life and to come together. And I've always felt like they were of a piece in some sense. And that ultimately I thought about that my since I was an undergraduate at least. And finally this book is uh me putting together um
How does Cleveland define the “unsayable” and why is it philosophically interesting?
of a a lot a lot of thinking into a sort of simple short book. about wha how I think they go together. And uh it's um i it's unusual, I think in a sense, because my my training and my interest uh is goes in two very different directions and one is um or they seemingly two different directions. One is I uh studied philosophy of mind and philosophy of uh language and logic and metaphysics and I do work in sort of the intersection of those things where I'm concerned about how logic and language and questions about reality. are connected. Um А на тіч і фали техніку курс. But I also have this uh love for uh aesthetics and literature and especially um especially the written word literature.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main focus of Timothy Cleveland’s book *Beyond Words*?
0:01–4:08
2
How does Cleveland define the “unsayable” and why is it philosophically interesting?
4:08–9:26
3
How did Cleveland’s personal background shape his interest in philosophy and literature?
9:26–26:48
4
What role does Wittgenstein’s view of language limits play in the discussion of the unsayable?
26:48–55:01
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