PHILOSOPHY AT A CROSSROADS

The history of philosophy is scored with crossroads, from the anecdotic to the foundational. Understanding the crossroads as a mise-en-scène of personal and intellectual crisis, this article scans the encounters of some of the most significant figures in twentieth-century philosophy with the canonical texts of Western mysticism. In such encounters, it is argued, the intimate testimony of spiritual crisis produces a duplicate crisis or countermovement inside the philosophical tradition, with strong, perhaps unexpected, consequences for its written modes of discourse.