- www.sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/complit/franke
william franke
Vanderbilt University, Divinity School, Faculty Member
- Harvard University, Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Department Memberadd
- Holding degrees in philosophy and theology from Williams College and Oxford University and in comparative literature ... moreHolding degrees in philosophy and theology from Williams College and Oxford University and in comparative literature from UC Berkeley and Stanford (Ph.D. 1991), William Franke is a philosopher of the humanities with a theological (especially negative theological) vision of the traditional disciplines of liberal learning and of the origin and significance of human culture. His A Philosophy of the Unsayable (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013) is the most directly influential statemetn of this philosophy. It builds on the twin volumes of On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), vol. 1: Classic Formulationsedit
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This essay, originally a keynote speech for celebratory occasions in East Asian universities, works from the personal experience of the author as a professor teaching and researching in Macao and visiting other universities of the region.... more
This essay, originally a keynote speech for celebratory occasions in East Asian universities, works from the personal experience of the author as a professor teaching and researching in Macao and visiting other universities of the region. The essay espouses a philosophy that moves from what cannot be said, the ineffable, as the basis for thinking both in the East, with its mystical philosophies focused on what escapes formulation in language, and the West, beginning from the Socratic wisdom of knowing nothing. This negative moment of encountering the other and the unknown, which entails a moment of relinquishing of language, is shown to be crucial to knowledge in the humanities and to resist the pressures toward specialization at the university. These considerations articulate an alternative vision of what liberal arts education can be today that is informed by both Eastern and Western cultural traditions. Their insights can be applied to pragmatic fields and be plied to place even ...
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Research Interests: Philosophy and Revelation
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Research Interests: History and Linguistics
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Research Interests: Psychology and Coda
This essay assesses each of the contributions in Parts 2 and 3 of the volume and draws consequences for the future of research and creative thinking on the topic of the apophatic. It brings out convergences and divergences between the... more
This essay assesses each of the contributions in Parts 2 and 3 of the volume and draws consequences for the future of research and creative thinking on the topic of the apophatic. It brings out convergences and divergences between the various authors and uses them to illustrate in specific terms the enigmatic and inevitably contradictory nature of apophatic thinking. It draws comparisons and contrasts with the directions currently being pursued also by other researchers in this field in order to fully bring out into the open what is distinctive about the approach outlined in this book. It illuminates the reasons why apophatic thinking at its current stage is turning to the body and aesthetics and pragmatics and other concrete fields of application. It discerns the (a)logic of such thinking as it spans from the most metaphysically abstract registers to the ineffably incarnate. The place of theology in apophatic thinking for the future comes into focus as an outstanding and vigorously...
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As primarily about itself, or self-reflexive, lyric can be considered to embody the vanity of language as well as its plenitude. Dante is anything but immune to these more skeptical perspectives. They are symbolized especially by the... more
As primarily about itself, or self-reflexive, lyric can be considered to embody the vanity of language as well as its plenitude. Dante is anything but immune to these more skeptical perspectives. They are symbolized especially by the figure of Narcissus. In the end, nevertheless, Dante’s “argument” concerns the way that lyric self-reflexivity can become a positive embodiment and a revelation of the very being of God as constituted by self-reflexive relation. This is a vision that is largely lost in modernity, with its more pragmatic outlook on language as an instrument of communication serving to express only our own thoughts. But Dante can help us see something more in language as a revelation that is poetic and theological at the same time. Dante teaches us to see this lyrical potential of language as specifically “theological” in nature. Dante’s chief insight is encapsulated in the lesson that self-reflection can be a reflection of transcendence, a vehicle to a beyond of language opening it to an Other. Self-reflection turns out to be quite the opposite of a closed circle of vanity that collapses the self upon itself. In a monotheistic vision of reality, the only true and absolute being is the one God. What is most proper to anyone’s individual being, then, is what most transcends one, the ultimate Cause of one’s being. Not what one has or objectively is but what makes one to be is one’s own most proper essence or highest truth. Only once the modern fiction of an autonomous self has been accepted and even become self-evident does the proper seem to be only a transformation of property. At that point, one’s ownmost being remains within the boundaries of what has been staked out as one’s own rather than reaching out towards connection with the Cause of All.
Research Interests: Philosophy and Narcissus
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The universal keeps up a constant pressure of self-surpassing on all forms of achieved identity; it undermines the self-satisfaction or sufficiency of any institutional form or structure. As such, it is the unconditioned that moves in... more
The universal keeps up a constant pressure of self-surpassing on all forms of achieved identity; it undermines the self-satisfaction or sufficiency of any institutional form or structure. As such, it is the unconditioned that moves in history, reversing and overstepping all exclusions in its path. It keeps the common run of history and politics on the march and constantly in search of itself throughout never final metamorphoses. The universal prevents the common from declining into mere communitarianism, with its inevitably sectarian tendencies. The universal keeps humanity in quest of itself—guided by an ideal. Even though no culture can ever step outside of its own singularity, so as to be universally valid as such, since there is no position (or stable ground to stand on) outside all cultures and their respective languages, still a transcendental Unconditioned nevertheless motivates such aspirations. In Kant’s terms, which Francois Jullien evokes, the universal is effective as a ...
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In Canto XVIII of Paradiso, Dante sees thirty-five letters of Scripture - LOVE JUSTICE, YOU WHO RULE THE EARTH - 'painted' one after the other in the sky. It is an epiphany that encapsulates the Paradiso, staging its ultimate goal... more
In Canto XVIII of Paradiso, Dante sees thirty-five letters of Scripture - LOVE JUSTICE, YOU WHO RULE THE EARTH - 'painted' one after the other in the sky. It is an epiphany that encapsulates the Paradiso, staging its ultimate goal - the divine vision. This book offers a fresh, intensive reading of this extraordinary passage at the heart of the third canticle of the Divine Comedy. While adapting in novel ways the methods of the traditional lectura Dantis, William Franke meditates independently on the philosophical, theological, political, ethical, and aesthetic ideas that Dante's text so provocatively projects into a multiplicity of disciplinary contexts. This book demands that we question not only what Dante may have meant by his representations, but also what they mean for us today in the broad horizon of our intellectual traditions and cultural heritage.
In the history and prehistory of human societies, poets, prophets, and seers (the wordvatescan cover all three) have often been virtually indistinguishable from one another. From time immemorial, their respective activities overlap and... more
In the history and prehistory of human societies, poets, prophets, and seers (the wordvatescan cover all three) have often been virtually indistinguishable from one another. From time immemorial, their respective activities overlap and interpenetrate to such an extent that prophets (or mantics or seers) and poets have been closely associated and tend to completely coalesce in many of their functions and modalities. The Sanskrit wordkavi(like its Latin cognatevates) embraces both. A certain strand of ideology running through the Bible (at least as interpreted by classical rabbinic texts) aims to drive a wedge between God-inspired prophecy and humanly created poems. Nevertheless, the Hebrew wordnabifor “prophet” means “bubbling forth, as from a fountain,” so the vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible, too, is naturally apt to suggest the creative fecundity of verbal imagination. In fact, Amos, Isaiah, Elisha, and Ezekiel frequently produce parables, proverbs, and even love songs.In primordial...
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The recent world economic crisis has also led to a ‘crisis of Economics’ discussion that flared up in 2008-2009. For the world economic crisis has not only shown the folly of modern finance legitimized through heady concepts such as... more
The recent world economic crisis has also led to a ‘crisis of Economics’ discussion that flared up in 2008-2009. For the world economic crisis has not only shown the folly of modern finance legitimized through heady concepts such as ‘rationality’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘financial innovation’, but it has also pointed to the blind spots of contemporary economics itself. The charge economics had to face was not just that it did not see the crisis coming (as always, there were unheard voices – but it is always easier to point to them ex post than to listen to them ex ante), but rather that it was actively involved in bringing modern finance, including its instruments, models and ‘ideology’, about. This ‘actively bringing about’ has at least two dimensions: the participation of academic economists who benefited substantially from the circulation of money, and the ‘inscription’ of economic theory into the social fabric of modern finance itself.
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Research Interests: Philosophy and Theology
This article outlines how Dante’s philosophy and theology turn on issues that are being debated in broader philosophical, theological, and theoretical milieus today. It emphasizes, in particular, how the new horizon opened by certain... more
This article outlines how Dante’s philosophy and theology turn on issues that are being debated in broader philosophical, theological, and theoretical milieus today. It emphasizes, in particular, how the new horizon opened by certain postmodern—and more specifically post-secular—turns in philosophy shifts the light falling on the interface between the concepts of transcendence and immanence. As a result, Dante’s attempt, in the twilight of the Middle Ages, to renegotiate the relations between the two shows up as acutely relevant and potentially groundbreaking for current philosophical and theological inquiry. The areas of inquiry traversed include realized eschatology as theorized by Agamben; Foucault’s archeological model of knowledge; Patristic and medieval hexameral exegesis; the tension between hermeneutics and deconstruction; political theology; the theological turn in phenomenology; secularism and humanities as crypto-theological forms of thought. All are examined as prefigure...
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My contention is that apophatic or negative theology is a classic tradition of interpretation of what Agamben is (not) talking about but of what is silently manifest in the phenomena he analyzes. Negative theology happens to be lucidly... more
My contention is that apophatic or negative theology is a classic tradition of interpretation of what Agamben is (not) talking about but of what is silently manifest in the phenomena he analyzes. Negative theology happens to be lucidly revealing of the logic of exception that the political-juridical history reconstructed by Agamben also reveals. I advocate negative theology as a model for understanding Agamben’s logic of exception because it has a certain precedence historically and serves as matrix for later, more secularized forms of thinking. It is itself a decisive first step on the path of secularization. It remains conversant with both theology and its negations—and precisely negation is foundational for so many distinctively modern approaches to reality. Yet apophatic postures of thinking are most natural to Asian philosophical and religious traditions. Deeply probing apophatic insight has been developed from earliest times in Asian currents of culture such as Taoism, Advaita...
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Research Interests: Philosophy and Arabic
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Research Interests: Philosophy and Revelation
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William Franke (Vanderbilt University) presents his latest book "Dante’s 'Paradiso' and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection" (New York: Routledge, 2021) in conversation with... more
William Franke (Vanderbilt University) presents his latest book "Dante’s 'Paradiso' and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection" (New York: Routledge, 2021) in conversation with Francesco Giusti. The opening conversation will be held in Italian, but questions in English or German are welcome. You are all welcome to join. To join the event, simply click on this Zoom link: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom.us/j/94404275830?pwd=U3hNSEdqZUpNc2kzS09tNzA5RE1OUT09 at 5:00 pm CET on Friday, June 25.
The event will be hosted by the international online seminar Lirica&Teoria, coordinated by Francesco Giusti (Bard College Berlin) and Christine Ott (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt). The seminar Lirica&Teoria brings together a group of scholars based in different countries to discuss questions of lyric theory as well as new approaches to the lyric, with a particular focus on the Italian poetic tradition. On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, the seminar will also host events open to the public and related to Dante’s lyric poetry.
The event will be hosted by the international online seminar Lirica&Teoria, coordinated by Francesco Giusti (Bard College Berlin) and Christine Ott (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt). The seminar Lirica&Teoria brings together a group of scholars based in different countries to discuss questions of lyric theory as well as new approaches to the lyric, with a particular focus on the Italian poetic tradition. On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, the seminar will also host events open to the public and related to Dante’s lyric poetry.