Paper Drafts by Martin Benson
The Downside Review, 2017
Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion is a Benedictine prayer-exercise that contains a famous argumen... more Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion is a Benedictine prayer-exercise that contains a famous argument for the existence of God. This article highlights how the argument is intertwined with the prayer. The article argues that since the understanding of God leads to a joyous affect, the logic of the argument must be causally connected with joy. While much of the secondary literature applies a division between ‘prayer’ and ‘proof’, this article suggests a reading of the Proslogion proof as a prayer-practice, and the prayer-practice is in turn analyzed through the logic of the proof. The result is a description of how contemplation of the argument drives affect, leading to the conclusion that the affect of joy achieves the intended result of the proof: the joy leads the mind to God. The article thus shows that the Proslogion is an intellectual affective prayer-practice.
Talks by Martin Benson
Conference Presentations by Martin Benson
The question of the origin of language and the question of its definition, as Merleau-Ponty discu... more The question of the origin of language and the question of its definition, as Merleau-Ponty discusses them in the Phenomenology of Perception, both condition and complicate one another. The definition conditions the origin, because we need to know what it is that appears in order to know the conditions of its appearance. On the other hand, the origin does not distinguish language, but identifies it with other forms of expression. So we have origin and similarity on one hand, and definition and singularity on the other. This is a tension that we find in Merleau-Ponty's text, and perhaps a general problem concerning origins. In the Phenomenology Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the relation of language to other forms of intentional meaning-expression, starting out from the view that " the word is indissolubly something said, heard, or seen " (245; or touched, we might add)1 , and that " it is the body that speaks " (203).2 Hence, whatever we say about language, we also claim by implication as a capacity of the body. Thus, words are not abstract phenomena for Merleau-Ponty, they are a vital part of embodied, perceptual and affective existence in an intersubjective world that has a history. This view reveals how language is grounded in the senses and the pre-linguistic gesture.
MA Thesis by Martin Benson
The thesis examines the nineteenth century German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche... more The thesis examines the nineteenth century German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche’s early notion of how a word is generated in the process of perception. It does so by looking at the “metaphorical transitions” Nietzsche talks about in the essay “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne” (“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-MoralSense”). According to the relevant passage in “On Truth and Lie…“ an image is first created as a metaphor for a stimulus and a word is then created as a metaphor for the image. Nietzsche also states that the word has two fundamental aspects: metaphor and concept. The essay, and in particular the passage on the metaphorical transitions, has often been interpreted either from a skeptical viewpoint, saying that Nietzsche’s enterprise is to reject philosophical realism and the Aristotelian/Kantian correspondence theory of truth. Or it has been interpreted from a dogmatic viewpoint, saying that Nietzsche holds that there is an insurmountable barrier between “consciousness” and “the world” and that human knowledge is therefore doomed only to consist of private and erroneous representations of a world beyond the reach of the intellect. This thesis suggests a third way of looking at the passage, where the metaphorical transitions are taken to be the very possibility of knowledge, since they constitute the human way of being in the world. Thus Nietzsche’s train of thought in “On Truth and Lie...” is interpreted as a general model for looking at how knowledge arises. By force of this interpretation, it is argued that a consequence of Nietzsche’s position is that the epistemological strength of language, taken as the ability to pose the question what something is, lies in its image creating aspect, the metaphor, rather than in its discursive aspect, the concept.
Papers by Martin Benson
Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion is a Benedictine prayer-exercise that contains a famous argumen... more Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion is a Benedictine prayer-exercise that contains a famous argument for the existence of God. This article highlights how the argument is intertwined with the prayer. The article argues that since the understanding of God leads to a joyous affect, the logic of the argument must be causally connected with joy. While much of the secondary literature applies a division between ‘prayer’ and ‘proof’, this article suggests a reading of the Proslogion proof as a prayer-practice, and the prayer-practice is in turn analyzed through the logic of the proof. The result is a description of how contemplation of the argument drives affect, leading to the conclusion that the affect of joy achieves the intended result of the proof: the joy leads the mind to God. The article thus shows that the Proslogion is an intellectual affective prayer-practice.
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Paper Drafts by Martin Benson
Talks by Martin Benson
Conference Presentations by Martin Benson
MA Thesis by Martin Benson
Papers by Martin Benson