Ineffability: The Failure of Words in Philosophy and Religion

A volume in the SUNY series. Scharfstein describes the extraordinary powers that have been attributed to language everywhere, and then looks at ineffability as it has appeared in the thought of the great philosophical cultures of India, China, Japan and the West. He argues that there is something of our prosaic, everyday difficulty with words in the ineffable reality of the philosophers and theologians, just as there is something unformualted, unformable and finally mysterious int he prosaic, everyday successes and failures of words.