William Franke is a philosopher of the humanities and professor of comparative literature at Vanderbilt University. He has been professor of philosophy at University of Macao; Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology at University of Salzburg; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation research fellow in Berlin; and Francesco de Dombrowski Visiting Professor at Harvard University's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. In 2021 he became Professor Honoris Causa of the Agora Hermeneutica. His apophatic philosophy is conceived and expounded in On What Cannot Be Said (2007) and A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014). It is extended into a comparative philosophy of culture in Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions Without Borders (2018) and applied to address current controversies in education and society in On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (2020). His most recent Pandemics and Apocalypse in World Literature: The Hope for Planetary Salvation (2025) plies his apophatic philosophy to illuminate issues of urgent public purport. He lectures and leads seminars on his ideas in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish on five continents.