Borges enjoys metaphysics for what it offers him as a writer of fiction. He appreciates speculative styles of philosophy for the very reasons that most practising philosophers in the West despair of them, as offering unfounded, contradictory, and frequently incredible representations of the cosmos. Borges is not in the least sceptical of the human mind, only of its medium, language, whose co-ordination with reality, which is not verbal, he rightly finds unconvincing. (p. 21)

He values philosophy for something quite other than its likely truth or falsehood: for its power to attract or astonish, and there is all too little to attract or astonish in the work of contemporary logicians. Borges can deal aesthetically with metaphysics because he disbelieves the justifications traditionally made of it. He is the freest of all free thinkers in the sense that he sees no need to refer metaphysical thoughts to reality in order...