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Housekeeping

Teaching Assistants | Office Hours | Requirements | Web | Course Texts

Teaching Assistants

The in-an-unusual-sense-TA for this class is Tim Knepper. I have asked him to provide a quick introduction to himself here.

Ok, life as an academic dilettante isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. So from a veritable host of religious and philosophical interests, I have narrowed my focus of study to issues at the juncture of philosophy of language and mysticism.

In particular, four questions currently occupy my attention. Firstly, assuming languages possess some sort of syntactic and semantic family resemblances, how do mystics (of the apophatic or negative persuasion) bend and/or break ordinary linguistic rules in order to indicate either the nature of the ultimate or an experience of the ultimate? Secondly, how do these syntactic and semantic violations compare cross-culturally? Thirdly, do such violations constitute a grammatical structure in their own right, linguistic rules by which mystics must play the game of negation? And lastly, can mystics (and others for that matter) negate without at the same time affirming? (Or to use the terminology of John Searle: What linguistic and epistemic status does illocutionary force negation (of an assertion) have? And are such negations by mystics any different from the illocutionary force negations of skeptics (or agnostics?)

I look forward to exploring questions of this nature as well as many, many other questions and issues pertaining to languages of religion, theology and mysticism during the course of the semester.

Office Hours

During Spring Semester, 2002, Prof. Wildman is available by appointment in STH 335 on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings and after the seminar meeting on Thursdays.

Requirements

This is a research seminar so the point is for students to do research. 40% of the course grade will be assigned for participation, class presentations, and resource reviews. The remaining 60% will be assigned for an original piece of research, presented in the form of a paper of about 4,000 words. What that entails will be discussed more precisely during seminar meetings.

Course Texts

There are no official "course books" for this seminar but the bibliography lists many of the books we are likely to spend time discussing.

Please note: this list is tentative but you can't go wrong reading the lot of them.

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