A Sketch of a Longer Project

 

Analogy and Open Concepts

    A good knife cuts well. A good teacher instructs with clarity and care. A good paper makes a clear argument. A good dive is clean, precise, and well executed. A good person acts justly, generously, and with integrity. A good meal is nourishing and satisfying. A good law promotes justice and order. In each case, the word "good" applies but it does not mean the same in every case; the meaning shifts when it is attributed to or predicated of different kinds of objects. A good knife is good as a tool. A good teacher is good as a guide and mentor. A good paper is good as a piece of student work. A good dive is good as a performance. A good person is good in character. A good meal is good as nourishment. A good law is good in its moral and civic function. The meaning of "good" changes. It stretches. It adjusts to the kind of thing being judged. The uses are analogical: they are different yet not completely different. There is an underlying core shared by all these diverse uses. Otherwise, the meaning of ‘good’ would be equivocal in the different cases, like ‘pride’ applied by a father to a son and ‘pride’ as referring to a family of lions.

     Another round of examples. A real diamond is made of carbon. A real friend stays with you in difficulty. A real answer addresses the question. A real city is more than a theme park. A real problem cannot be ignored. A real danger poses an actual threat. A real promise binds the one who makes it. In each case, "real" affirms something. But it affirms something different depending on the object. Words like "good" and "real" are not technical terms. They do not have a single, fixed meaning. Their meaning shifts across uses. This is not a flaw, as many logicians have understood it (giving rise to Nominalism, which recognizes only univocal and equivocal uses of words). This is just how language works. Language stretches because reality is itself many-layered and never absolutely apprehended, and so analogical stretch concepts are what allow us to express new insights.

   In contrast, technical terms in math and science have fixed meanings. A triangle has three sides. A square has four equal sides and four right angles. These meanings do not stretch. They are set by definition. Words like "good" are different. They are not closed. They are open. An open concept cannot be defined once and for all. Its meaning cannot be fixed in advance of all future uses. It grows with experience and reflection. The philosopher Morris Weitz called such terms open concepts. He used the example of art. He argued that art has no closed definition. Each new artwork can change our understanding of what art is. The same is true of most moral and philosophical terms.

  A further point. Jose Ortega y Gasset said that real language allows meaning to grow. A system of terms fixed in advance is not a real language; it is a pseudo-language since it cannot respond to life. He wrote:

A language is a system of verbal signs through which individuals may understand each other without a previous accord, while a terminology is only intelligible if the one who is writing or speaking and the one who is reading or listening have previously and individually come to an agreement as to the meaning of the signs.

The logic of open concepts or stretching makes this possible. For example, in my youth a necessary condition of marriage was that only a man and a woman could be married. This depended on a further concept, homosexual, defined as a sexual compulsion and perversion, i.e., by implication unfree and loveless. The experience of life pushed against this conception when it could no longer be denied that homosexuals were capable of love and commitment. Thus the concept of marriage stretched to include the possibility of same sex marriage for many people (not all). Or Joyce stretched the concept of a novel beyond its expression by Victorian writers. This to illustrate how a concept can deepen (or go inflate, depending on your view) in response to experience. If, however, my pre-conceptions are too existential for my life to be open to change, then I will rigidly deny the reality of any new experience that calls them into question. Ulysses is not a real novel; same sex marriage is not true marriage, etc. This attitude is antithetical to philosophy, and I think religion, though opinions differ on that.

  

Emerson on Metaphor

   Another related thought. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that poetry is “language used at full stretch”; that language is “fossilized poetry.” Words carry traces of metaphor, reaching beyond fixed use, stretching to disclose some aspect of the world. (Or failing to do so.) Emerson’s point is central to understanding how open concepts work. Language begins in metaphor. When we first encounter something strange or deep, we do not define it. We name it by comparison, by likeness. We call God a rock, a father, a light, a shepherd. We call time a thief, life a journey, grief a wound. These are not just poetic images. They disclose aspects of the things themselves (perhaps concealing other aspects). They give form to experience that is otherwise mute. Truth and meaning begin in this stretch. Metaphors give us access to layers of reality that literal language cannot hold. A metaphor is not merely subjective. It is a bridge. It connects what we know with what we do not yet know how to say. It shows what is real, but not yet conceptually mastered. “Poetically man dwells” is the title of an essay by Heidegger. The contrast would be man as a nominalist logician, assigning to each object an arbitrarily chosen sign.

     Granted, metaphors can also mislead. They can even become a cage. The conceptual metaphor "argument is war" shapes how we think. We speak of attacking, defending, shooting down. We treat disagreement as battle. This closes down inquiry. It encourages victory, not truth. If instead we think of argument as a journey or dialogue, we open space for mutual discovery. Other metaphors distort as well. "Time is money" makes us see time only as a resource, not as a gift. "The mind is a machine" reduces thought to output. "Nature is a machine" encourages exploitation. These metaphors shape experience. Like thoughts and emotional responses, metaphors can be true or false in a sense, more or less revealing or fitting to reality.  While metaphors can reduce as much as they reveal, good metaphors stretch language because reality stretches us.

    

 

Wittgenstein’s Family Resemblance Metaphor

     This connects to a related point in the philosophy of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein used the example of the word "game" to show how many ordinary concepts work. There is no single feature shared by all games. Instead, there is a network of overlapping similarities. He called this a family resemblance. The same holds for many value-laden words. Their meaning comes from patterns of use, not fixed criteria.

     Family resemblance helps us see the stretch. It draws attention to the way concepts evolve through use, shaped by patterns of life, by thinking and inquiry. This insight can be joined with the logic of analogy and metaphor. Concepts like "good," "true," or "real" can deepen over time, or grow shallow, depending on how they are used and how faithfully they respond to the structure of experience. When they deepen, they do not drift arbitrarily. They reveal new aspects of a core meaning. This is the measure of a good metaphor and meaningful stretch. These shifts in meaning emerge not from social convention alone, but from the effort to remain in touch with reality from the perspective of being-in-the-world.

    What seems right is that concepts can deepen (or become more shallow), based largely on the logic of analogy and metaphor, originating in forms of life but also thinking and inquiry, which while remaining rooted in a form of life is never bound to it (a point Wittgenstein does not stress enough). So I think there is connection between family resemblance and Emerson’s insight. And while I agree that concepts can not only stretch but break, even as the same word continues to be used (arguably as with ‘game’), as long as the concept doesn't break something of the core meaning is involved in all the shifts of meaning, though the shifts of meaning might reveal different aspects of the core meaning. And flowing from responses to reality, to 'being in the world.' Words like "good" or "true" can stretch because they are rooted in a common direction: they disclose something real.

      W. Norris Clarke (The One and the Many, 2001) emphasizes that the analogy is not merely a linguistic or conceptual tool but is rooted in the very structure of reality. Clarke argues that all finite beings participate in the act of existence (esse) in diverse ways, reflecting a shared but analogously manifested reality. This participation underscores a unity among beings, grounded in their existence, while also accounting for their diversity. Clarke writes: “Total diversities, with nothing whatsoever in common between them, are incomparable, in fact unthinkable.” Even amidst the vast diversity of beings, there is a foundational commonality rooted in their existence, which is understood analogically. This provides a bridge between concepts and the ontological structures they (always relatively deeply) make present.

     Thus Wittgenstein’s family resemblance thought uncovers the pattern. But the pattern needs a center. Without a core meaning, family resemblance collapses into Nominalism (words are only labels). We end up with a word used in many ways but referring to nothing stable. Nominalism denies any shared meaning (essence) behind different uses. It treats all differences as mere convention. But analogical concepts resist this as they point to a real unity in difference. They name what diverse realities share by participation in something more fundamental. "Good" and "true” and many key philosophical concepts retain a center of gravity. They apply across cases because reality shows itself like this. Our words reach to match it. That is why open concepts matter, however much logicians dislike them.

 

Quine’s Holism

     I would like to bring in Quine’s holism to further this line of thought. In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, Quine argues that knowledge is not made up of individual propositions tested one by one. Instead, it forms a web of belief: central concepts (like logic, identity, causality) are more resistant to change; peripheral ones (particular empirical claims) are easier to revise. When faced with new experiences that challenge our beliefs, we can revise the web at many different points, not just the part in direct contact with the observation. His illustrative example: You could, if you wanted, treat Mount Olympus and its gods as real, if you were willing to make enough adjustments elsewhere in your system of belief. This explains how people can interpret the same data very differently, namely, because they have different conceptual frameworks into which the data is being integrated.

      Quine is making a radical epistemological point: there is no sharp boundary between analytic truths (true by definition) and synthetic truths (true by how the world is). All of our knowledge, including math, logic, science, metaphysics, is part of an interconnected web of belief. What holds it together for him is not direct contact with “pure data” – reality –  but coherence and pragmatic success. Therefore, if we receive a piece of sensory data (say, a thunderstorm over Mount Olympus), we don’t automatically reject or accept a belief (e.g., “Zeus hurled a lightning bolt”). Whether we accept that belief depends on how it fits into our broader conceptual system. So, Quine writes (paraphrased): You could preserve belief in the Greek gods, even treat them as real, if you are willing to make enough adjustments to your surrounding beliefs about physics, history, anthropology, etc. In other words, to treat Zeus as real today, you would have to reinterpret or reject large parts of modern science, meteorology, and historiography. There’s no one privileged place in the web of belief that is immune to revision, not even logic or math in extreme cases. So no belief is beyond revision; what matters is whether the revised system remains coherent and workable.

      I want to save an important insight here from the metaphysical implications Quine himself (not illogically) draws from it. I want to show how it illuminates conceptual deepening rather than mere adjustment. Where Quine focuses on substitution and readjustment to preserve coherence, the line of thought I am pursuing adds the dimension of deepening i.e., disclosure of reality. A web of belief is not just logically structured as it was for the nominalist Quine; it is also formed by metaphors, analogies, and core meanings that stretch across many domains. Shifts in meaning are not just defensive (to save the system), but sometimes truth-seeking, born of the desire to respond to new aspects of reality.

    Take the example of marriage: 'Is my friend married (a lesbian union)?' I say she is; my friend says she isn’t, because as an evangelical Christian for him a necessary condition for a union to be a marriage is that it be between a man and a woman. Homosexuality, moreover, is seen as disordered and contrary to nature, perhaps reflecting to depictions in Genesis (the Sodomites who wanted to rape the angels who appeared as men) or St. Paul’s negative response to Greek-pagan homosexual practices. Now here the truth depends on the meaning of marriage and homosexuality, and that meaning is only intelligible in a larger web of beliefs; both my friend and I would have to make major changes in our belief webs to change our position. Quine is not suggesting we should believe in Zeus. He’s showing that meaning and truth, logically, are system-dependent. You change the system, you change what is acceptable as real.

    Quine’s idea that all of what we take to be real or factual rests on conceptual assumptions that themselves are not factual or clearly real. So even the fact that we have two hands could be doubted if we are willing to doubt the reality of all our experience (perhaps we are brains in vats). The marriage example, the person I was thinking of would have to doubt assumptions – for him deep convictions – to change the view of marriage: that the Bible is the word of God; that it interprets itself; that homosexuality is a perversion according to the Bible. Since changing those deeper beliefs is not something he can consider, he holds on to the traditional concept of marriage even though it causes him to condemn a beloved niece. Another might feel condemning the niece would be wrong and thus force changes in their deeper web of beliefs: one can agree that homosexuality can be love-less and pornographic (as can heterosexual sex!): the Bible instances portray it as such (desiring to rape the angel in Sodom!). Thus one can condemn rapacious or love-less (unnatural) sex while acknowledging the fact that homosexuals are also natural (exist in every culture) and are capable of love and commitment – I know of such cases. While homosexual marriage might not be the paradigm, it is still a form of marriage as long as it is based on erotic love (which is different from friendship-love but no less love) and life-long commitment. Like the paradigm apples are red, but yellow apples are still apples.

       Hence, some Christians can embrace homosexual marriage by feeling forced to adjust their understanding of homosexuality and the Biblical references. Quine, I believe, just cares about what is logically possible. I feel the change of marriage to include the possibility of love between homosexual people reflects a deepening of the concept that has come from a confrontation with reality – like my friend’s marriage and the pain of demeaning it.  In Quine’s terms, we can either reject revealing experience by hardening our conceptual web – homosexuals can’t love or marry because that would contradict my preconception or tradition’s preconception; or respond in this case as my deeper moral beliefs tell me to – with generosity – and adjust ideas in my conceptual web that were not so much wrong as too narrow. And not just pragmatically to maintain coherence but because the adjustment corresponds to reality.

      In this way, the concept has stretched, not by abandoning its core, though the core meaning did shift i.e., it stretched by reexamining what the core truly is based on a challenge on the surface. This shift does not necessarily represent a break with tradition but can be interpreted as a deepening of the tradition. Instead of defining marriage by gender roles or reproductive potential, some argue we are now seeing more clearly that marriage is about covenantal union, faithful presence, and the shared journey of life. This reinterpretation can be viewed as an analogical extension of the original meaning, a recognition that the inner essence of marriage (relational fidelity, mutual gift, moral seriousness) may take forms that were once culturally invisible. The concept of marriage remains meaningful because it is tethered to a lived center. The metaphor of marriage (as union, as bond, as promise) remains intact. But it opens up, disclosing new possibilities that are coherent with its inner structure. This also demonstrates the difference between arbitrary redefinition and analogical development. The former severs a term from its roots. The latter allows the term to respond faithfully to deeper insight into the nature of love, personhood, and relational dignity. This process is also arguable, which seems to be part of it.

     Another example. Jesus’ transformation of the Old Testament picture of God. Jesus doesn’t reject the God of Abraham but reveals the deeper heart of that God as revealed in the Beatitudes, the story of the woman caught in adultery, the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, the call from the cross to forgive the tormenters: “Be merciful, as your Father in heaven is merciful.” The web stretches but does not break because the reinterpretation is truth-directed, analogically continuous, and tied to lived experience (healing, forgiveness, love of enemies).

   Where Quine sees belief revision as a pragmatic exercise in preserving coherence under the pressure of experience, the line of thought I am developing enriches this with a more ontologically responsive logic. Reinterpretation is not just functional; it can be morally and existentially truer. The “web” stretches not just for consistency, but for fidelity to Being, in the Emersonian and Thomistic sense. Quine's web of belief is the form; the train of thought I am developing – of analogical truth and open concepts – is the content that fills and reorients the form toward a fuller encounter with reality. Quine’s holism explains how conceptual shifts are possible without the collapse of meaning. The approach I am exploring explains why some conceptual shifts are better: namely, because they deepen our grasp of what is real, through analogy, metaphor, and lived contact with truth. Quine provides a map of how we navigate conceptual change. I would offer a deeper account of why we do it and what it means to do it well.

 

The Hermeneutic Circle

     Understanding unfolds in lived experience. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s emphasis on the role of 'Vor-urteile' (prejudgments) and 'foregrounding' in interpretation aligns closely with Quine’s idea of holism. For Gadamer, we never approach a text or event neutrally; we always bring our prior understandings, expectations, and historical situatedness – how could it be otherwise? These do not necessarily distort our view, though they can; in any case, they make understanding possible. They are like tickets to admission. Similarly, Quine’s insight that no belief is tested in isolation, but always within a larger web of beliefs, reinforces the idea that our interpretive framework is holistic and shaped by inherited and situated knowledge.

      The hermeneutic circle refers to the way we come to understand meaning: we interpret the parts in light of the whole, and the whole in light of the parts, as the marriage example above illustrates. This is not a flaw in our knowing but a necessary expression of our finitude. As Quine’s holism explains, our beliefs and concepts are interwoven, shaped not by isolated observations but by our whole conceptual web. Wittgenstein, too, though cautious about metaphysics, recognized that meaning arises in the flow of life, in patterns of use – what he called family resemblance. But as we’ve argued, this resemblance is not merely pragmatic. It is analogical: at its best, rooted in a shared orientation toward reality

   When we say that words like “good,” “true,” or “real” stretch but do not break, we affirm that something like a core meaning (Emerson might say a poetic insight) is being deepened across time and context. Analogy becomes the very medium through which being reveals itself. In this light, the hermeneutic circle is a dynamic, living movement in which truth does not float free of experience but emerges through the interplay of person and world, tradition and insight, perception and reformulation. In all meaningful human matters – texts, relationships, art, ethics, education, politics – we do not approach things as neutral observers but as engaged interpreters, already shaped by our biography, relationships, genes, language, history, social-and-economic structures,  technology, and much more. Just try to get out of yourself and read a poem or think about a problem of justice as though you were not the one reading or thinking! That doesn’t mean, however, we are imprisoned in our subjectivity – as though our minds were enclosed in a submarine with no window onto the sea but only instrument panels with no way to compare our readings with the reality of the sea itself. It does mean that truth in this realm discloses itself (never absolutely) through dialogue, through a back-and-forth movement between self and world, self and others, present and past, known and unknown, inner life and outer form. This, far from being a flaw that cuts us off reality ala certain political movements and cults, is the necessary structure of all understanding that involves understanding.

    The kind of reality being disclosed is not brute fact but meaningful being: a poem, a gesture of love, a law, a musical phrase, a moral act, political justice or injustice. These realities do not show themselves automatically to everyone, like the weather; they must be received, interpreted, understood. And such understanding requires the active participation of each of us: our attention, thinking, honesty, memory, and sometimes suffering. It matters who we are, what character we have, what our educational and social-cultural background is, and what we care about. In this sense, Heidegger wrote: “Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht” (science does not think). Which is precisely why it is attractive to many: it seems to promise a path to knowledge that doesn’t ask anything of our inner lives, no risk, no transformation, no self-involvement. It also puts our “subjective” inner lives beyond thought and thus possible criticism. The appeal of applying science to the realm of meaning. But in matters of meaning – education, art, justice, love, vocation – that path is closed. You cannot outsource your thinking to a machine, a formula, or an algorithm.

 

Seeing from Within and Without: Truth and the Hermeneutic Circle

    The hermeneutic circle pictures how meaning discloses itself to finite, embodied beings. Whether reading a text, interpreting a historical event, or trying to understand another person, no human being ever comes to these things presuppositionless. We necessarily come with a background, a history, a set of assumptions. But the goal is not to remain inside our perspective; it is to work through it, to be corrected and deepened by the reality we engage.

     In “Meditation in a Toolshed,” C. S. Lewis distinguishes between two ways of knowing: “looking at” something versus “looking along” it. He illustrates this with a simple image: standing in a dark toolshed, he sees a beam of sunlight entering through a crack. When he looks at the beam, he sees dust motes lit up by the sun. But when he steps into the light and looks along the beam, he sees the world outside, leaves and the sun itself. The same beam yields two entirely different kinds of vision. This becomes a metaphor for how we can either analyze an experience from the outside or enter into it and see the world through it.

    Lewis challenges the common assumption that only “looking at” something gives true knowledge. For example, a scientist might describe love merely as a mix of neurochemicals like dopamine and oxytocin, or faith as an evolutionary adaptation. That kind of explanation might be useful, but it does not capture what love or faith mean to the person who is in love or who believes. When we look along love, we encounter its depth — sacrifice, longing, joy. When we look along faith, we may see a moral vision or sense of presence that cannot be reduced to neurons firing. A pathologist cannot tell us much about how to think well about death. An obstetrician not much about how to understand new life. Lewis’s point is not to reject analysis, but to insist that inner experience, too, can reveal truth. To deny this kind of knowledge just because it is personal or experiential is to blind ourselves to what may be most real.

     Thus Lewis argues that while objective, detached analysis has its place, it cannot be the only path to truth. Some things can only be known by stepping into them. If we insist on standing outside every experience, explaining everything away, we may miss the very reality those experiences are trying to reveal. Just as we cannot understand sunlight only by watching it illuminate dust in the dark, so too we cannot understand love, beauty, or faith without ever daring to look along their beams.

     Lewis is equally clear that looking along is not infallible. He gives the example of a person who sincerely believes a rain dance causes rain, based on their cultural experience. They are looking along the practice but what they see is not necessarily true. This shows us something important: both the inside and the outside views are fallible. You can be wrong from within: for example, being deluded by emotion, tradition, ego. And you can be wrong from without: missing the meaning of what you observe by standing too far away, treating people as objects or symptoms.

    C. S. Lewis’s distinction between “looking at” and “looking along” an experience closely parallels Hans-Georg Gadamer’s understanding of interpretation and the hermeneutic circle. Gadamer, as stated, argues that understanding is not a matter of standing outside a text, tradition, or experience to analyze it “objectively,” but of entering into it from within one’s own historical and personal context. He emphasizes that all understanding is shaped by our prejudices (Vorurteile) – not irrational biases, but the pre-judgments that make understanding possible in the first place. Gadamer’s notion of the hermeneutic circle is another way to capture Lewis’s idea that the full meaning of an experience only becomes visible when we inhabit it. Just as stepping into the beam opens up a larger world beyond the shed, so entering into dialogue with a text or tradition reveals deeper meaning than analysis alone can provide. In both views, meaning is not something we extract by standing above or outside an experience, but something we uncover by participating in it. Lewis and Gadamer thus converge in rejecting a purely reductive, external view of truth: they insist that true understanding often requires a kind of involvement, a fusion between observer and subject, that opens up a world richer than detached observation alone can grasp.

 

Thomas Weiskel and the Sublime

    I want to draw on a further source: Thomas Weiskel’s treatment of the sublime. In the first stage of Weiskel’s sublime, one begins with a stable network of assumptions: marriage is understood as a lifelong union between a man and a woman, often oriented toward procreation. This belief is embedded in a wider conceptual web (Quine) and supported by inherited Vor-urteile (Gadamer) – prejudgments shaped by religious, social, and legal traditions. But then comes the confrontation with lived experience: the person one loves and trusts most – say, one’s niece – marries someone of the same sex. This personal reality challenges the existing framework, and the old concepts no longer explain or accommodate the full moral and emotional depth of what is now encountered. Weiskel’s second stage – the crisis of meaning – sets in. The conceptual web strains; the prejudgments reveal their limits. One either rejects the experience or allows it to reshape the larger pattern. Quine would describe this as a revision of the web: not just substituting one belief, but adjusting the relationships among many beliefs (about love, dignity, fidelity, moral normativity). Gadamer would speak of a fusion of horizons: a willingness to listen, to let the reality of this person and this union address and transform the interpreter’s world. In Weiskel’s third stage, metaphor and meaning are reestablished on a deeper level: marriage is not abandoned, but re-seen, now grounded more explicitly in covenantal fidelity and personal union. A new, more adequate concept arises, neither a mere innovation nor a rupture, but an analogical deepening, integrating what was once excluded. Of course, as in the case of my friend, the surface challenge may be rejected to preserve the conceptual web or to keep the circle closed – at the risk of closing off important realities.

     Another example. I am thinking of something Frodo said in Lothlórien in the Lord of the Rings (Book II/Chapter 6):

As Frodo prepared to follow him, he laid his hand on the tree. Never before had he been so keenly aware of the life within it. He felt the delight of the wood and the touch of it neither as forester nor as carpenter. It was the life of the living tree itself.

This encounter with the tree in Lothlórien follows a similar structure. He begins with ordinary categories – trees as resources, as part of the forest world known to foresters and carpenters. These function like Quine’s peripheral beliefs or Gadamer’s fore-structures of understanding: implicit assumptions through which the world is routinely interpreted. But when Frodo lays his hand on the tree and becomes vividly aware of its life – its own being, not merely its use – he is drawn into what Weiskel calls stage two of the sublime: a moment of epistemic rupture, where the existing categories fall silent. The experience is real, affectively powerful, and yet conceptually disorienting. The tree is no longer just an object in the world; it becomes a presence, a sign of life that resists reduction. According to Quine, the web of belief must now be restructured to make room for this new data, not by denying it, but by adjusting deeper assumptions about what it means to be alive, to perceive, to relate to non-human life. Gadamer would see this as a moment when the text of the world – the tree in this case – “reads” the interpreter, and a fusion of horizons becomes possible. Frodo, in ceasing to treat the tree instrumentally, opens himself to a different kind of relation: not of mastery but of attunement. In Weiskel’s third stage, this new relation is stabilized through metaphor and feeling: the tree becomes a symbol of the life of the world, of silent and irreducible being. It is not merely a change of mood but a transformation in understanding, a reorientation of both language and perception. The conceptual web expands. The hermeneutic circle widens. The tree is now not just seen but known, not just understood but received. (A capitalist, of course, could maintain his belief in a meaningless nature by reinterpreting the experience as sentimental.) Each deepening of conceptual understanding requires a disruptive experience that calls everyday understandings into question, and is resolved with a fresh (analogical, metaphoric) reconstitution of the concept at a deeper level – unless one is shut off from the sublime.

 

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. Edited by Joel Porte, Library of America, 1983.
(See “The Poet” for the quote on poetry as “language at full stretch.”)

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. 6th ed., Mohr Siebeck, 1990.

Heidegger, Martin. Was heißt Denken? Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1954.

Lewis, C. S. “Meditation in a Toolshed.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper, Eerdmans, 1970, pp. 212–215.

Norris, W. Clark. The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics. Marquette University Press, 2006.

Ortega y Gasset, José. The Misery and the Splendor of Translation. Translated by Elizabeth Gamble Miller, University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Quine, W. V. O. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Classics of Analytic Philosophy, edited by Robert R. Ammerman, Hackett Publishing Company, 1990, pp. 309–328.

Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. 

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, 3rd ed., 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition, Wiley–Blackwell, 2001.