Paul L. Beckett

Back to the Beckett text

Chronic Conditions: Beckett, Bergson and Samuel Johnson

This article analyses the work of the twentieth-century late modernist Samuel Beckett, in light of the turn-of-the-century anti-rationalist Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the eighteenth-century neoclassicist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). What unites these three very different thinkers is a concern over habitual, automatic and involuntary behavior, which in all three cases has a distinctly neurolog...

L. A. Paul Truth Conditions of Tensed Sentence Types

Quentin Smith has argued that the new tenseless theory of time is faced with insurmountable problems and should be abandoned in favour of the tensed theory of time. Smith’s main argument attacks the fundamental premise of the tenseless theory: that tenseless truth conditions for tokens of tensed sentences adequately capture the meaning of tensed sentences. His position is that tenseless truth c...

پل کلودل Paul Claudel

The Phenomenal Presence of Invisible Legs: Beckett and the Actor

ed, and conceptualized” (Garner “‘Still Living Flesh’: Beckett, MerleauPonty, and the Phenomenological Body” 448). 2. Kuhn’s influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), specifies that landmark scientific advancements such as Newton’s Principia should be understood as paradigms because “[t]heir achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adher...