Connecting the Dots: The Ontology and Ethics of Intersubjectivity in Borges’s “The Writing of the God”

• Main Author: Lund, Brendan Kurt
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2019
• Subjects: subjectivity; objectivity; ethics; epistemology; Borges
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/8280; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9280&context=etd

How do we establish objectivity when each person’s perspective is uniquely subjective? Borges’s “The Writing of the God” shows how an epistemically isolated subject is incapable of ever arriving at a robust sense of objectivity without reference to an Other. Donald Davidson’s theory of interpretive triangulation posits that the Other’s external perspective establishes objectivity by making the subject aware of the limits of his or her perception. Emmanuel Levinas suggests that the face of the Other establishes ethics as first philosophy through a primordial, affective discourse. The ethical relation is what undergirds the questions of epistemology which Davidson addresses.