(Ebook) The Thought of John Sallis Phenomenology Plato Imagination 1st Edition by Bernard Freydberg ISBN 9780810128279 0810128276

The thought of John Sallis dwells not only on imagination, but within imagination. The gently eloquent bearing of his writing has a seductive pull, and the reader who thinks along with him fi nds herself suddenly in the midst of the deepest philosophical ideas, and very often with the means to address them. While their intrinsic rigor is never in question, neither is the role of the reader as fellow thinker and as implicit dialogical partner. Sallis’s treatment of the most abstruse thinkers allows his reader to experience them as lucid, just as his most radical thoughts fl ow with an ease that makes them seem inevitable. This melodic aspect of his writing is also rooted in the conviction that the limits of reason are so f i rmly established that human insight must take its departure from other sources as well. It would be misleading to characterize these other sources negatively, that is, as “non- rational.” This is so because there is nothing privative at all about them. It would more nearly capture their nature by calling them imaginatively inspired resources, though this description only hints at their complexity. Some of these resources are poems; of these poems, some are complete theatrical works. Others belong to the visual arts. Still others are cryptic fragments offering their own tantalizing attraction. The refl ective and inspired dimensions of Sallis’s thought are not two separate strains. Rather, they are united in a philosophical talent that is exemplary and novel at once. The home of his thought in imagination drives Sallis to visit many and different places. However, as Heidegger said of Schelling, rarely has a thinker fought so passionately since his earliest periods for his one unique standpoint. The history of philosophy also lives in Sallis’s work. The thought of his ancestors, both near and remote, is neither overcome nor left behind. Rather, it is appropriated in such a way that it retains its force in the very way that it is creatively transfor