This comparative approach shows how the Platonic viewpoint sheds new light on Borges' essayistic and fictional work. Analyses to which extent his thought is deeply rooted in classical philosophical doctrines.

In Rethinking Philosophy with Borges, Zambrano, Paz, and Plato, Hugo Moreno argues that in Ficciones, Claros del bosque, and El mono gramático, Jorge Luis Borges, María Zambrano, and Octavio Paz practice a literary way of philosophizing—a way of seeking and communicating knowledge of reality that takes up analogical procedures. They deploy analogy as an indispensable and irreplaceable heuristic tool and literary device to convey their insight and perplexities on the nature of existence. Borges’ ironic approach involves reading and writing philosophy as fiction. Zambrano’s poetic reason is a mode of writing and thinking based on an imaginative sort of recollection that is ultimately a visionary’s poetizing technique. Paz’s poetic thinking relies on analogy to correlate and harmonize an array of worldviews, ideas, and discourses. In the appendix, Moreno shows that Plato's Republic is a forerunner of this way of philosophizing in literature. Moreno suggests that in the Republic, Plato reconciles philosophy and poetry and creates a rational prose poetry that fuses argumentation and narration, dialectical and analogical reasoning, and abstract concepts and poetic images.

Cover -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part I: Philosophical Inquisitions -- Chapter 1: Labyrinthal Paradigms: Western Philosophy in Borges' Oeuvre -- Chapter 2: Literary Philosophers: Mythos and Logos in Borges and Plato -- Chapter 3: Philosophy and Ideology: Dialectical Orientalism in Borges' Writings -- Part II: Comparative Perspectives -- Chapter 4: Borges and Schopenhauer: Microcosms and Aesthetic Observation -- Chapter 5: Borges, Heraclitus, and the River of Time -- Chapter 6: A View from Eternity: The Archetypal Quest -- Chapter 7: Borges and Levinas Face to Face: Writing and the Riddle of Subjectivity -- Chapter 8: Narrative Aspect Change and Alternating Systems of Justice: A Wittgensteinian Reading of Borges -- Chapter 9: Borges, Wittgenstein, and Kierkegaard on the Boundaries of Language: Mystical Silence and Indirect Communication -- Chapter 10: Borges and Berkeley: Idealism and the Ontology of the Fantastical Object -- Bibliography -- Index of Names -- Index of Subjects

Includes the stories The Congress, Undr, The Mirror and the Mask, August 25, 1983, Blue Tigers, The Rose of Paracelsus and Shakespeare's Memory.

Kant's Dog provides fresh insight into Borges's preoccupation with the contradiction of the time that passes and the identity that endures. By developing the implicit logic of the Borgesian archive, which is most often figured as the universal demand for and necessary impossibility of translation, Kant's Dog is able to spell out Borges's responses to the philosophical problems that most concerned him, those of the constitution of time, eternity, and identity; the determination of original and copy; the legitimacy of authority; experience; the nature of language and the possibility of a decision; and the name of God. Kant's Dog offers original interpretations of several of Borges's best known and most important stories and of the works of key figures in the history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Saint Paul, Maimonides, Hume, Locke, Kant, Heidegger, and Derrida. This study outlines Borges's curious relationship to literature and philosophy and, through a reconsideration of the relation between necessity and accident, opens the question of the constitution of philosophy and literature. The afterword develops the logic of translation toward the secret at the heart of every culture in order to posit a Borgesian challenge to anthropology and cultural studies.

"In the first book devoted to the impact made by Borges on the contemporary aesthetic imagination, Aizenberg brings together specially commissioned essays from international scholars in a variety of disciplines to provide a wide-ranging assessment of Borges's influence on the fiction, literary theory, and arts of our time."--Publishers website.

Jorge Luis Borges is acknowledged as one of the great Spanish writers of the twentieth century. On the broader literary scene, he is recognized as a modern master. His fascination with philosophy - especially metaphysics - sets him apart from his contemporaries. Borges appreciated and formulated rigorous philosophical arguments, but also possessed the unique ability to present the most abstract ideas imaginatively in metaphors and symbols. Borges wandered among the great masters seeking a firm purchase that he could not find, and therefore expressed a nostalgia for metaphysics as he lost himself in his labyrinths. Borges and Philosophy traces Borges' philosophical concerns in his tales, essays, and poems and argues that despite his apparent skepticism in philosophical matters, a careful reading of Borges' texts reveals a coherent philosophical path that underlies his work.