Indefinability: An Essay in the Philosophy of Cognition

The world of experience, the Phenomenals, consists of elementless relations that defy definition. Our phenomenal picture of the world thus emerges as a complex of "relations as such". In criticizing the logicians' naive hope of building a purely logical representation of the world, Josephine Pasternak proposes a categorical approach to cognition that avoids the pitfalls of classical and modern logic. Like her brother Boris Pasternak, Josephine Pasternak draws up a philosophical and poetic vision of the world. "It is a real philosophical thought", Dame Iris Murdoch writes in her preface, and continues "deep and stirring, and presented with authority and elegance. I am so glad that it will be published." Josephine Pasternak was born i Moscow in 1900. In 1921, she moved to Germany where she studied Philosophy at the Universities in Berlin and Munich. In 1929, she became Doctor of Philosophy for a thesis on the psychology of perception. In 1938, she moved to England and took up residence in Oxford where she lived until her death in 1993. She has previously published Ein Beitrag zur Lehre von den akustischen Intermittenzerscheinungen; two books of poems in Russian, and the memoirs of her father, the Russian portrait painter, Leonid Pasternak.