Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Borges, Jorge Luis - Floyd Merrell (essay date 1991)

Floyd Merrell (essay date 1991)

SOURCE: “Metaphysics of Deceit,” in Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics, Purdue University Press, 1991, pp. 2-15.

[In the following excerpt, Merrell discusses the place of Nominalism and Idealism in Borges's work.]

The deeper you try to go into the character of these universal relations which have always been the subject of philosophy, the less you feel inclined to make any pronouncement about them whatever; because you become ever more aware how unclear, inappropriate, inaccurate and onesided every pronouncement must be.

—Erwin Schrödinger

Borges occasionally alludes to Samuel Coleridge's observation that we are all born either Platonists or Aristotelians (Otras inquisiciones [hereafter abbreviated as OI,] 56; 123; Labyrinths [hereafter abbreviated as L,] 146).¹ The Platonists believe...

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