Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation by Silvia G. Dapía (review)

Borges is such a provocative writer that it is not surprising he has attracted the attention of not only key figures of the so-called continental tradition in philosophy (including Foucault and Derrida) but also those associated with the analytic tradition that predominates in philosophy departments in the English-speaking world (e.g., Goodman, Rorty, and Danto). Many scholars of Borges have some passing familiarity with the former; fewer know much about the latter. If Silvia Dapía's book receives the attention that is its due, this could change.

Dapía is not so much interested in the ways Borges has been engaged by the latter group of thinkers as she is in situating him with regard to particular issues of interest to post-analytic philosophers in general. Their work, in turn, should be understood against the backdrop of a tradition that takes its bearings from two broad reference points. First, the early analytic tradition was guided by the positivistic hypothesis that language and the universe were somehow isomorphic and that the logical structures embedded in our language reflect (or "represent") mind-independent features of reality itself. Dramatic advances in the field of formal logic in the early twentieth century initially bolstered the hope that philosophy might be "naturalized" or rendered continuous with the sciences. Consequently, philosophers in the so-called analytic tradition accepted the charge to attend to language, particularly its formal properties. Second, the wager failed. The heirs to the early analytic philosophers consequently repurposed some of the tools of their predecessors while maintaining their dispositions and style. These tools included an enduring attraction to argumentative form; perspicuous, if technical, forms of expression; and a general—but far from universal—ambition to continue to attempt to align philosophical inquiry with the kinds of issues explored by the sciences, even if some of the wind had been knocked out of their sails by logical positivism's collapse. Some of the most important figures in this tradition include Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, Nelson Goodman, and Arthur Danto, each of whom is featured in the book's first four chapters.

Dapía identifies some of the key issues that have emerged subsequent to the collapse of the analytic tradition regarding the issue of representation, for example, the relation in which language stands to the world. Thus she takes up themes such as Goodman's vision of the world-making capacities of art, Rorty's advocacy for vocabularies fashioned without concern for metaphysical foundations, Davidson's work on radical interpretation and his argument for a hermeneutics of charity, and Danto's discussion of indiscernible counterparts and the ontology of the work of art. Dapía takes up these issues in her explication of Borges and describes him as a kind of precursor to each (albeit an occasionally skeptical one), although she observes that it would be misguided to read Borges as a philosopher proper.

Her methodology is mostly consistent from chapter to chapter: she identifies a cluster of issues associated with the featured philosopher and then explicates several texts by Borges in light of the issues associated with him. She discusses an array of texts both well-known (e.g. "Funes el memorioso," "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") and others less often studied ("El congreso"). Dapía's readings are frequently insightful and rewarding: her patient discussion of "La busca de Averroës" in the Putnam chapter is a case in point.

That said, not every text and author pairing is inspired: one sometimes feels the marriage of philosopher and text has been at the barrel of a shotgun. The discussion of the arbitrariness of our arithmetical system in "Tigres azules," for instance, seems to me to offer little support for Dapía's claim that the story could be read as a proto-Rortyan parable about the dependence of mathematical truths upon the arbitrary vocabularies we have devised. The questions the story raises seem to run in almost the opposite direction: what...