While apophatic theology has been quickly dismissed by the vast majority of analytic philosophers, Samuel Lebens is among the few who has tried to show that such a theological position is tenable by appealing to two main philosophical moves. The first move is that many of our claims about God are false (or nonsensical). The second move is that such false (or nonsensical) claims about God are illuminating and/or therapeutic. This article presents Lebens’s account of apophatic theology, and defends it from the main criticisms. However, it also shows that, contrary to what has been suggested by Lebens himself, the disjunction which appears in the first move has to be understood as exclusive, that is, either many of our claims about God are false or many of our claims about God are nonsense. Tertium non datur. Moreover, this article argues that, in both cases, Lebens’s account of apophatic theology stumbles upon some important issues. For, if many of our claims about God are taken to be false or nonsensical, Lebens fails to explain how such claims can be illuminating and/or therapeutic.

Rereading Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, this article explores how Morrison’s work at the limits of language performs the haunting ties between the Reconstruction era and the present day by offering readers a way to experience a rememory of their own. By repeatedly emphasizing the inadequacy of language in expressing traumatic experience, Beloved encourages its readers to, like its characters, look beyond language and seek out a kind of ineffable, embodied knowledge to better understand the lingering traumas of slavery. Through Morrison’s concept of “invisible ink,” which points to the inevitability that lived experience cannot be captured in language by the author alone but must be filled in by an active reader, this article makes a larger argument: that Beloved acts as both an invitation and a guide to read the ghostly, invisible ink of history that exists outside the novel, haunting our world itself.

As early as Plato and as recently as current scholarship, readers of Parmenides have diagnosed tensions of one sort or another between his ontological views and the language through which he expresses those views. In the first instance, this article examines earlier claims for such tensions and argues that they are predicated on problematic assumptions concerning Parmenides’ ontological commitments or his strictures regarding the use of language. In the second instance, however, it argues that Parmenides’ Way of Reality does indeed confront us with tensions between language and doctrine, that these tensions are more pointed and sustained than scholars generally recognize and that they can be identified independently of specific or determinate elaboration of Parmenides’ precise ontological views. This analysis discloses a reflective preoccupation with, and a consistent attitude towards, the scope and limitations of human language. Parmenides persistently evinces his awareness that his description of what-is proceeds through expressive measures that are imported with difficulty from a different domain and, consequently, are limited, indirect and often figurative. The article closes by pointing to a meaningful (but partial) affinity between Parmenides and those Platonists who placed their own ultimate philosophical and ontological principle beyond the expressive reach of words.