SOURCE: “Borges on Language and Translation,” in Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 19, No. 2, October, 1995, pp. 320-29.

In the following essay, using Borges's tale “Averroes' Search,” Stewart considers the cultural determination of language and understanding.

Although Jorge Luis Borges had years of philosophical training and expressed a number of philosophical theories in his literary works, he never published a philosophy treatise. The result is that his oeuvre has often been viewed as purely literary and been largely neglected by trained philosophers. However, by ignoring the philosophical aspects of Borges's thought, criticism has neglected a vast dimension of his work and has thus frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted many aspects of it. As I have tried to demonstrate in an earlier article,¹ there are important philosophical themes in the short stories of Borges, which have yet to be considered. In the present essay, I take up one of these heretofore neglected themes...