From Plato to Panini to Levinas

Ori Z. Soltes teaches at Georgetown University across a range of disciplines, from art history and theology to philosophy and political history. He is the former Director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum. He has authored or edited 31 books and several hundred articles and essays. Among these are Searching for Oneness: Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam and The Problem of God and How Humans Have Tried to Solve It Across History.

Introduction: The Cratylus and Its Problems 1. The Problem of Defining Terms 2. The Issue of Φύσις—Νόμος 3. The idea of Etymology amd Etymologies in the Cratylus 4. Characters and Contexts in and beyond the Cratylus: from Prodikos to the Peloponnesian Wars 5. From the Ἀπορία at the End of the Cratylus to Panini 6. Language Study and Linguistic Thinking from the Stoics to the End of the Nineteenth Century 7. From Wittgenstein to the Cratylus 8. From Saussure to Barthes: Langue, Langage, Parole, Signs, Semiology and Cratylean Concepts 9. The Cratylus in the Passage from Derrida’s Deconstruction to Levinas’ Ethical Conundrum 10. Ethical and Linguistic Issues from Aurobindo to Giri Conclusions: Language and Ethics from Within the Cratylus to Beyond the Theological Implications of the Holocaust