1st Edition

From Plato to Panini to Levinas The Problem of Language for Philosophy and Theology

By Ori Z Soltes Copyright 2025
418 Pages
by Routledge India

418 Pages
by Routledge India

This volume offers an innovative exploration of Western social and religious thought and bridges the expression of a regional imagination with several planetary conversations. It reconnects Plato and philosophy to the issue of theology and religion and the limits of language as an instrument in engaging both disciplines. While beginning with the language problem as Socrates lays it out in Plato’s... Read more

Introduction: The Cratylus and Its Problems                       `                                    

1. The Problem of Defining Terms

2. The Issue of Φύσις—Νόμος

3. The idea of Etymology amd Etymologies in the Cratylus

4. Characters and Contexts in and beyond the Cratylus: from Prodikos to the Peloponnesian Wars

5. From the Ἀπορία at the End of the Cratylus to Panini

6. Language Study and Linguistic Thinking from the Stoics to the End of the Nineteenth Century

7. From Wittgenstein to the Cratylus

8. From Saussure to Barthes: Langue, Langage, Parole, Signs, Semiology and Cratylean Concepts

9. The Cratylus in the Passage from Derrida’s Deconstruction to Levinas’ Ethical Conundrum

10. Ethical and Linguistic Issues from Aurobindo to Giri

Conclusions: Language and Ethics from Within the Cratylus to Beyond the Theological Implications of the Holocaust

Biography

Ori Z. Soltes teaches at Georgetown University across a range of disciplines, from art history and theology to philosophy and political history. He is the former Director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum. He has authored or edited 31 books and several hundred articles and essays. Among these are Searching for Oneness: Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam and The Problem of God and How Humans Have Tried to Solve It Across History.