Fate, Time, and Language

Name: Fate, Time, and Language
Price: 149.95 AUD
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ISBN: 9780231151566

An Essay on Free Will

David Wallace, Steven Cahn, Maureen Eckert (University of Massachusetts Dartmouth) , James Ryerson

$149.95

Hardback

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English

Columbia University Press
10 December 2010

Semantics; Literary studies: general; Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge; Philosophy: logic

In 1962, the philosopher Richard Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that human beings have no control over the future. David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor's method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but also noted a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor's argument.

Fate, Time, and Language presents Wallace's brilliant critique of Taylor's work. Written long before the publication of his fiction and essays, Wallace's thesis reveals his great skepticism of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of certain paradigms of thought-the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever gimmickry of postmodernism-that abandoned ""the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community."" As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor, we witness the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with his struggle to establish solid logical ground for his convictions. This volume, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, reproduces Taylor's original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace. James Ryerson's introduction connects Wallace's early philosophical work to the themes and explorations of his later fiction, and Jay Garfield supplies a critical biographical epilogue.

By: David Wallace
Afterword by: Jay L. Garfield
Introduction by: James Ryerson
Edited by: Steven Cahn, Maureen Eckert (University of Massachusetts Dartmouth)
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 210mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 18mm
Weight: 383g
ISBN: 9780231151566
ISBN 10: 023115156X
Pages: 264
Publication Date: 10 December 2010
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) wrote the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl with Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes the essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and the full-length work Everything and More.

Reviews for Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

Fatalism, the sorrowful erasure of possibilities, is the philosophical problem at the heart of this book. To witness the intellectual exuberance and bravado with which the young David Foster Wallace attacks this problem, the ambition and elegance of the solution he works out so that possibility might be resurrected, is to mourn, once again, the possibilities that have been lost. -- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Author of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

Commended for Independent Publisher Book Awards (Philosophy) 2011
Winner of Independent Publisher Book Award (gold medal) for Classical Studies / Philosophy 2011