Timothy Knepper

An associate professor of philosophy at Drake University (Des Moines, Iowa), where he chairs the Department of Philosophy and Religion and directs a program in comparative philosophy of religion called The Comparison Project. He teaches and researches in the philosophy of religion, comparative religion, late ancient Neoplatonism, and mystical discourse. And he is the author of forthcoming monographs on the future of the philosophy of religion (The Ends of Philosophy of Religion) and Dionysius the Areopagite (Negating Negation).

Email: tim.knepper@drake.edu

Issue: 3:2 (The tenth issue)

Is the Dionysian God, or an experience of the Dionysian God, absolutely ineffable? Does the Dionysian corpus assert or perform such ineffability? This paper will argue that the answer to each of these questions is no. The Dionysian God is known hyper-nous as the hyper-ousia cause of all. And the Dionysian corpus unambiguously refers to, asserts of, and metaphorizes about this God just so. In arguing these points, this paper will call upon both the speech act theory of John Searle and the metaphor theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. More particularly, it will look to Searle’s rules of reference and predication and conditions of illocutionary acts, as well as Lakoff and Johnson’s schematization of metaphor gestalt and entailment to show how Dionysian expressions of inexpressibility are rule-governed and the Dionysian God is thereby (relatively) effable.