2023.02.5 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Timothy Cleveland, Beyond Words. Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable, Lexington Books, 2022, 140pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781793614841.
Reviewed by Iris Vidmar Jovanović, University of Rijeka
Imagine, as Timothy Cleveland in his Beyond Words. Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable invites us to do, a world in which Plato’s banishment of art was successful, and “a philosopher [. . .] rules the state in a perfectly rational fashion” (9). What, Cleveland asks, is lost in such a “triumph of philosophical method?” To him, that is obvious: “What would be cut off along with the poets, and all forms of creative expression that sprung from them, is an avenue of innovative expression crucial to discovery, understanding, and knowledge” (10). One crucial aspect of such knowledge, Cleveland goes on to argue, an aspect that cannot be conveyed in other forms of writing, relates to “things we can know or have insight into…
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