Introduction
Borges, or the geography of sentience
pp. 1-13
in: Alfonso J. García-Osuna (ed), Borges, language and reality, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
A recurring topic in the papers presented at Hofstra University’s “Borges and Us” conference is that of the Argentine author’s complex relationship with reality. That may well be because the participants recognize in Borges “a genuine effort to overcome the narrowness that Western tradition has imposed as a master and measure of reality.”1 That narrowness is in large measure a consequence of the chronic influence of positivist approaches to reality laid out by Plato and iterated by Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century, methods that rely on empirical evidence for any authentication of what is “real.” If one assumes that—in spite of post positivist amendments proposed by philosophers like Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn—positivist perspectives are still the indispensable component of our Weltanschauung, then we must agree that it would take a calculated disruption of the positivist canon in order to overcome the constrictions that, according to many, it has inflicted on human...
