Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S18-S21, March‐April 2022.

Fabi and Goldberg raised important considerations regarding both research and funding priorities in the field of bioethics and, in particular, the field’s misalignment with social justice. W...

In 2009 the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil established a conflict resolution mechanism to help rural communities address their grievances against palm oil companies that are RSPO members. This article presents the broadest ever comprehensive assessment of the use and effectiveness of the RSPO conflict resolution mechanism, providing both overviews and in-depth analysis. Our central question is: to what extent does the RSPO conflict resolution mechanism offer an accessible, fair and effective tool for communities in Indonesia to resolve conflicts with (...) companies? Our aim is not only to provide a ‘reality check’ of this mechanism but also to contribute to the wider debate on how communities can seek access to justice when engaged in intractable conflicts with palm oil companies. For data collection, we took three steps. First, we used our own database of 150 conflicts between communities and companies in Indonesia. We identified 64 conflicts that involved RSPO member companies, of which 17 prompted communities to convey their grievances to the RSPO’s conflict resolution mechanism. Second, we used the database of the RSPO, which handled 85 complaints against companies in Indonesia in the period 2009–2020. Third, we conducted fieldwork, in total, about 6 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews on three conflicts involving RSPO companies to identify mechanisms leading to both failed and successful instances of conflict resolution. For our assessment, we used three criteria to assess the conflict resolution mechanism of the RSPO: accessibility, procedural justice, and the outcomes of the process. We conclude that—on all counts—the conflict resolution mechanism is biased in favor of companies. The result of these biases is that the actual capacity of the RSPO’s mechanism to provide a meaningful remedy for rural communities’ grievances remains very limited. This unequal access to justice sustains conflicts between companies and communities over land. (shrink)

The poetry of Blas de Otero (1961) andYehudaAmichai (1924-2000) invites the 20th century human being to speak out on the main issues of his existence: love, loneliness, suffering, solidarity, injustice, death, hope. A central place in their work is taken up by the merciful and faithful God of the Bible, whose image seems to be refuted by the dramatic situation in which the human being happens to live. The poet’s word stands up against God’s word equipped with his resources: (...) intertextuality, metaphor, comparison, antithesis, sound effects, irony. Both authors place the reader before the task of construct and deconstruct the depiction of the Biblical God. (shrink)

The article deals with the images of Lithuania found in Czesław Milosz’s poetry. The novels and essays have only been used to confirm the conclusions drawn from the interpretation of selected poems. Despite the frequently-declared unwillingness of the author of Dolina Issy [The Valley of the Issa] to accept and use any autobiographical elements in literature, the land of his childhood has always been present in all the poet’s works. The explanation of this fascination with nostalgia seems to be (...) unsatisfactory. The author of the article perceives the poetic images of Lithuania created by the uprooted immigrant as a symbol of his inner, not purely geographical, settlement. The subject of the discussion is the ever-changing perception of the Eastem-Borderland, which corresponds to particular stages of the protagonist’s journey through life. The starting point is the experience of eviction. It modifies the originally idealized vision of the „little homeland” and makes the hero’s attempt to reject or „amputate” it. The poems from the volume Światło dzienne [Daylight] surprise the reader by a hostile attitude towards the poet’s youth spent in Lithuania and the perception of these early memories as some destructive forces threatening the artist. It is only after a many-years’ quest that the borderland heritage is appreciated and conquered again. Now, however, it acquires a different, more symbolic form. The cycle Miasto bez imienia [A Town without a Name] and the poem Gdzie wschodzi słońce i kędy zapada [Where the Sun Rises and Sets] are evidence of a gradual transformation. The faithful recreation in the poet’s memory of particular places and people changes into the construction of some outside religious space, built from the traces of the real world. Lithuania changes into a perfect reality, a Super-Land, capable of retaining the past and combining it with the present. It is a prop freeing the poet from the waste land of Urizen. (shrink)

Two intertwined stories evince the influence of colonialism on Western universities. The first story centers on a conflict about wild rice research between the Anishinaabe people and the University of Minnesota. Underlying this conflict is a genetic notion of biological identity that facilitates the commodification of wild rice. This notion of identity is inextricably linked to agricultural control and expansion. The second story addresses the foundation of Western universities on the goals of civilization and capitalist productivity. These norms persist even (...) in diversity efforts through a focus on individualized notions of difference rather than socially contextualized and politically significant identities. The tendency to produce both knowledge and knowers as commodities results in the alienation, individuation, and abstraction of objects of research and researchers themselves. Decolonial change demands that we learn the specific histories of our universities and disciplines, break disciplinary boundaries, and contest commodification in knowledge production. (shrink)

In our post-9/11 environment, our sense of relative security and stability as privileged subjects living in the heart of Empire has been profoundly shaken. Hollander explores the forces that have brought us to this critical juncture, analyzing the role played by the neoliberal economic paradigm and conservative political agenda that emerged in the West over the past four decades with devastating consequences for the hemisphere's citizens. Narrative testimonies of progressive U.S. and Latin American psychoanalysts illuminate the psychological meanings of living (...) under authoritarian political conditions and show how a psychoanalysis "beyond the couch" contributes to social struggles on behalf of human rights and redistributive justice. By interrogating themes related to the mutual effects of social power and ideology, large group dynamics and unconscious fantasies, affects and defenses, Hollander encourages reflections about our experience as social/psychological subjects. (shrink)

Like Plato, Protagoras held that young children learn virtue from fine examples in poetry. Unlike Plato, Protagoras taught adults by correcting the diction of poets. In this paper I ask what his standard of correctness might be, and what benefit he intended his students to take from exercises in correction. If his standard of correctness is truth, then he may intend his students to learn by questioning the content of poems; that would be suggestive of Plato’s program in Republic (...) III. But his standard is more likely to be the accurate use of language; in that case he would intend his students to learn to express their thoughts clearly enough that their audience would understand what they were saying. That standard would be independent of the truth of what they are saying; and that would be a precursor to modern techniques by which we try to teach speaking and writing. Truth is not so easy to escape, however, and we shall see that Protagoras’ exercise must assume that the poet is trying to tell the truth. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 279-301.

The central questions addressed in this article are: 1) Can writing poetry be both a process, and a product of research? and 2) How can writing poetry be therapeutic to the writer and reader? The author has developed his own theories of poetry as research and poetry as therapy by action research into his writing. He argues that in thinking about the process of writing verse, he has come to see that some poetry is a (...) form of research, and way of knowing. He has observed and recorded ways in which writing has been therapeutic for both the writer and for the reader or listener. The article develops and supports the notion of poetry as research by referring to a growing literature on poetic enquiry. The author then analyses and illustrates how poetry can be therapeutic to the writer and to readers. In a similar way, the article draws on a different literature on poetry as therapy to support his argument. (shrink)

Why have poets played such an important role for contemporary philosophers? How can poetry link philosophy and political theory? How do formal considerations intersect with philosophical approaches? These essays seek to establish a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. Each essay contributes to our understanding of the relationships between theory and lived experience while providing new insight into important poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Victor Hugo, and others. The broad range of metaphysical, phenomenological, aesthetic, and ethical approaches (...) announce important new paths for a reinvigorated study of lyric poetry in the decades to come. (shrink)

The author attempts to encompass the self, or a self, that, while at some times appears to be his own, at other times not, thus encompassing and continually morphing. It is a mixture of poetry and prose.

This is the first modern, annotated and scholarly edition of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’ _Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting_, one of the seminal works of modern aesthetics in any language.

Why is there a long-standing debate about paraphrase in poetry? Everyone agrees that paraphrase can be useful; everyone agrees that paraphrase is no substitute for the poem itself. What is there to disagree about? Perhaps this: whether paraphrase can specify everything that counts as a contribution to the meaning of a poem. There are, we say, two ways to take the question; on one way of taking it, the answer is that paraphrase cannot. Does this entail that there is (...) meaning mysteriously locked in a poem, meaning that cannot be represented in any way other than via the poem itself? If that were so it would have profound implications for poetry’s capacity to convey insight. We suggest reasons for thinking that the entailment does not hold. Throughout, we connect the traditional debate over paraphrase, which has largely been conducted within the fields of philosophy and literary theory, with recent empirically oriented thinking about the communicability of meaning, represented by work in pragmatics. We end with a suggestion about what is to count as belonging to meaning, and what as merely among the things that determine meaning. (shrink)

In the Netherlands, the poet Herman Gorter is mostly known as the author of the neo-romantic poem May and the “sensitivistic” Poems, but internationally he became famous as a propagandist of radical Marxism: the author of influential brochures and of an “open letter” to comrade W.I. Lenin in 1920. During the 1890s, Gorter became increasingly dissatisfied with his poetry, considering it as ego-centric, disinterested and “bourgeois”, unconnected with what was happening in the real world. He wanted to put his (...) poetry on a scientific footing, notably by endorsing a dialectical materialist worldview. In the communist society he envisioned, science would become poetry and poetry would become science. In his opus magnum Pan, two terms are rather prominent, namely heelal and kristal. These signifiers not only reflect important themes, but also two friendships which began around 1900, namely with prominent astronomer and marxist Anton Pannekoek and with Ada Prins, the first woman in the Netherlands who acquired a PhD in chemistry, specialised in liquid crystal research. Whereas Ada Prins is mostly remembered as one of Gorter’s secret lovers, she was first and foremost his educated guide into the complex and enigmatic world of twentieth-century chemistry research. Liquid crystal chemistry became an important source of inspiration for Gorter’s work and the main objective of this paper is to demonstrate her influence on Gorter’s Pan as a scientific poem After presenting the two heroes of this paper, and their work in poetry and chemistry respectively, I will analyse the role of liquid crystals in Herman Gorter’s Pan, highlighting important connections with Ada Prins’ research into liquid crystal chemistry. (shrink)

In the Netherlands, the poet Herman Gorter is mostly known as the author of the neo-romantic poem May and the “sensitivistic” Poems, but internationally he became famous as a propagandist of radical Marxism: the author of influential brochures and of an “open letter” to comrade W.I. Lenin in 1920. During the 1890s, Gorter became increasingly dissatisfied with his poetry, considering it as ego-centric, disinterested and “bourgeois”, unconnected with what was happening in the real world. He wanted to put his (...) poetry on a scientific footing, notably by endorsing a dialectical materialist worldview. In the communist society he envisioned, science would become poetry and poetry would become science. In his opus magnum Pan, two terms are rather prominent, namely heelal and kristal. These signifiers not only reflect important themes, but also two friendships which began around 1900, namely with prominent astronomer and marxist Anton Pannekoek and with Ada Prins, the first woman in the Netherlands who acquired a PhD in chemistry, specialised in liquid crystal research. Whereas Ada Prins is mostly remembered as one of Gorter’s secret lovers, she was first and foremost his educated guide into the complex and enigmatic world of twentieth-century chemistry research. Liquid crystal chemistry became an important source of inspiration for Gorter’s work and the main objective of this paper is to demonstrate her influence on Gorter’s Pan as a scientific poem After presenting the two heroes of this paper, and their work in poetry and chemistry respectively, I will analyse the role of liquid crystals in Herman Gorter’s Pan, highlighting important connections with Ada Prins’ research into liquid crystal chemistry. (shrink)

Poetry is a literary art, and is often examined alongside the novel, stories, and theater. But poetry, much of it, has more in common with music, in important respects, than with other forms of literature. The emphasis on sound and rhythm in both poetry and music is obvious, but I will explore a very different similarity between them. All or almost all works of literary fiction have narrators—so it is said anyway—characters who, in the world of the (...) fiction, utter or write the words of the text thereby reporting the events of the story. But there is a very different way of understanding literary works, one applicable especially to poetry. Much music can be understood in a similar manner, and doing so nicely explains several important characteristics of listen-ers’ experiences. (shrink)

Do poems provide “scripts” for reader’s thoughts? Kendall Walton’s account of poets as thoughtwriters, in which poems can serve to express readers’ thoughts without positing an expressive thinker in the poem, is considered from various angles. While it seems a minimal expressive thinker needs to be posited, this leaves open other questions about poems as the stuff of thought. Can poems be fully thought, and do readers take ownership of the thinking that poetry prompts? Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” (...) is discussed as a poem that allows the reader a chance to separate aspects of content and control of thought. (shrink)

"Collects Martin Heidegger's pivotal writings on art, its role in human life and culture, and its relationship to thinking and truth"--Publisher description.

This paper reads Republic 583b-608b as a single, continuous line of argument. First, Socrates distinguishes real from apparent pleasure and argues that justice is more pleasant than injustice. Next, he describes how pleasures nourish the soul. This line of argument continues into the second discussion of poetry: tragic pleasures are mixed pleasures in the soul that seem greater than they are; indulging them nourishes appetite and corrupts the soul. The paper argues that Plato has a novel account of the (...) ‘paradox of tragedy’, and that the Republic and Philebus contain complementary discussions of tragic and comic pleasure. (shrink)

This volume is the translation of a book whose title is Targeting Sunnis: Who Will Lead the Arabic-Islamic World, Sa’udi Arabia or Iran?—A Western-Israeli-Iranian Strategic Plan to Dominate the Mid...

Poetry evokes mental imagery in its readers. But how is mental imagery precisely related to poetry? This article provides a systematic treatment. It clarifies two roles of mental imagery in relation to poetry—as an effect generated by poetry and as an efficient means for understanding and appreciating poetry. The article also relates mental imagery to the discussion on the ‘heresy of paraphrase’. It argues against the orthodox view that the imagistic effects of poetry cannot (...) be captured by prosaic paraphrase, but points to features of poetry that can shape aspects of mental imagery that are liable to be lost in paraphrase. (shrink)

This article presents an edition of, and commentary on, a fragment of papyrus preserved in the collection of the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah (P.Utah 280). This well-preserved piece is a rare example of Arabic papyrus with lines of poetry. The text of the verses and their attribution in the papyrus will be studied in detail and traced through later sources, leading to a discussion on textual variation and authorship as well as on the value (...) of papyrological evidence vis-à-vis the corpus of classical Arabic literature. It will be shown that lineages of text and attribution can be highly complex and therefore do not lend themselves to linear representation, e.g., in book form or simple HTML format. The article outlines the requirements for alternative means of representation for textual layers and points to existing tools in Arabic studies and other disciplines. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and poetry in his habilitation and his first lectures in Freiburg. Although poetry as a particular phenomenon was not yet thematized by Heidegger, philosophy and language developed in its proximity since the habilitation text. Subsequently, a tragic quotation exemplifies the characterization of language as a premundane generality in his first lessons. The article elaborates an interpretation of the implicit relationship between philosophy and poetry based on the pre-mundane language [Vorweltliche] (...) and its critique of neo- Kantianism. This relationship is the phenomenological possibility of letting see through language, especially the phenomena of world and meaning. Therefore, phenomenology and poetry came together in Heidegger’s thought around those two central phenomena of his later ontology. (shrink)

How can absence make presence become? The question turns a usual notion of form inside out; it subverts normative habits in drawing distinctions. If we adapt the models of time by which we might consider such things (and not-things), the relational terms of form can shift. Two lines of inquiry are pursued in this article. The first is an investigation of form and its relation to time. The second is an exploration of paradox in describing forms of art. Both are (...) cybernetic in their framework and approach. The ‘Hastig’ (‘Hastily’) movement of Robert Schumann’s 1839 piano work Humoreske is the form that serves as site for the two inquiries to intertwine. Its construction presents a paradox through which form and time may be called into question. In considering Schumann’s composition as a re-conceiving of form and time, an idea emerges; art can make us aware of the constraints and possibilities of our models and our experiences of paradox in living with them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martin Warner PHILOSOPHICAL POETRY: THE CASE OF FOUR QUARTETS I FOR plato the quarrel between philosophy and poetry was already an ancient one. Since his day strenuous efforts have been made to eliminate it by circumscribing each widiin carefully specified boundaries, on die principle that strong fences make good neighbors, and allowing die one to venture onto the territory of the other only as licensed. Thus until (...) recently assessments of the literary quality of a philosopher's writing have commonly been treated as extraneous to its value as philosophy, and philosophical probing of die thought of a poem as irrelevant to a literary critic's final assessment ofit. For some works, however, such compromises seem forced; Four Quartets is a case in point. Here we have a sustained effort to explore issues of a philosophical and theological nature in poetic terms — in a manner that challenges our understanding and lays claim to our assent. The poetry does not merely encapsulate a theoretical position, but enacts a process ofthought perceived as bearing on diese topics at least as significandy as do those processes commonly termed "philosophical," and diereby raises by implication more general issues concerning die status of those "philosophical" modes themselves. F. R. Leavis is well known both for his engagement with the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and for his insistence on a clear separation between literary criticism and philosophy; dius his raising of philosophical questions as an integral and decisive element in his final and most extensive analysis ofthe Quartets is particularly striking: That Four Quartets offers us thought, searching, basic and rigorous, we have our assurance in the first ten lines of"Burnt Norton".... As thought, it aspires to a general validity.... 222 Martin Warner223 The questions, how must reality be conceived, and what is the nature of the human situation, have been raised in a way diat compels one to determine and verify one's own ultimate beliefs.1 Of course, Leavis is clear that the manner in which die poem raises these questions is not that traditionally associated with philosophy: "The 'music' of Four Quartets challenges a criterion that is not logic, but something equivalent in the field of total meaning. We can only tell what it is by intelligent self-exposure to the poetry" (p. 159). Similarly his mode of"determining " and "verifying" his own beliefs in response is that proper to literary criticism. But the questions are plainly philosophical ones, and one does not need the authority of Leavis to see that the poem raises them. From a philosophical point ofview, the interesting questions are the status of the manner in which it does so and the nature of the "criterion that is not logic" which is said to have an internal relation to that "intelligent selfexposure to the poetry" which Leavis in his critical practice seeks to exemplify. Unfortunately, this late commentary on Eliot's poetry is among the weakest in the Leavis corpus, precisely lacking "intelligent self-exposure to the poetry";2 but this should not lead us to dismiss its more general claims. In earlier and far stronger criticism Leavis had already argued that "Burnt Norton" does "by strictly poetical means the business ofan epistemological and metaphysical inquiry" ("Eliot's Later Poetry," p. 65). Further, die most distinguished recent criticism of Eliot's poetry is probably that of A. D. Moody,3 and he too finds himself driven to place his own "ultimate beliefs" in relation to it. On the one hand, "There is likely to be at least some degree of essential conformity between the way we live now and die way in which the poem would order life; and to that extent the poem can be said to express, and to give a form to, the sensibUity ofits age" (p. 264). But on the other, "It is a neurotic vision, one arising from some disorder or disease of the personality — or of his culture.... It is not easy to attain a detached view of die neurosis which is like a dominant gene in our culture. It is a matter... of the alienation ofman from mat to which he properly, of his nature, belongs — his being cut off from... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 151-163 [Access article in PDF] Defining "Poetry" Robert B. Pierce SINCE TERMS ARE THE TOOLS of literary study, it is important to keep these tools in good condition, above all by having clear and functional meanings for them. Notoriously, many critical arguments about texts are in fact differences about terminology, and many confused arguments are built on vague or arbitrarily used terms. Few (...) have been the subject of more critical worrying and infighting than "poetry," 1 and few are more disparately defined. Definitions that are fuzzy or tendentious confuse many a discussion of poetry, and in particular they often narrow our response to the rich variety of the texts in front of us by silently imposing a view of what poetry ought to be. I would like to suggest that a Wittgensteinian approach to meaning can cut through a lot of the difficulty that surrounds the term. The refined understanding of the term "poetry" will result in a certain demystification, but it will dissipate only a false mystery based on confusion, not the real mystery of depth and richness that poetry can offer.What does it mean to approach this issue as a Wittgensteinian? The main principle is that the meaning of a term is its use, the way people deploy it in their speaking and writing, the work that it does. 2 A word does not have an essential core of meaning of which the various social uses are approximations; rather those social uses are the meaning. Thus meaning is a social phenomenon, and the way to determine it is to [End Page 151] look outward at how people use a term, not inward for some presumed mental essence that the term designates. Meaning is conventionally divided into reference and sense. What the term "poetry" refers to is a group of publicly visible things in the social world that we call poems, but there is no distillation in the mind that is the essence of poetry, the sense of the term. Of course we have a sense of the term that controls its range of reference. That sense is made up of our bases for calling one thing poetry and not another: the qualities that incline us to see a text as a poem. Wittgenstein would call these defining qualities criteria. The crucial fact is that they are determined by social processes and so are available to public inspection, not hidden away to be discovered only by introspection.Another observation about what it is to assign meaning to a term is important here. If someone asserts that "poetry" means X, he or she can appropriately be asserting that in fact the offered definition describes how people use the term, or else he or she can be suggesting how the term should or will be used in a specific discourse, that is, offering a definition proposal or stipulative definition. In the latter case the proposer needs to show the utility of the change from ordinary speech for his or her purposes. That is of course what literary critics do when they specify meanings for a term like "tragedy" or "irony" that are different from common usage. It is not that Wayne Booth's way of talking about irony uses the real meaning (both his and the ordinary senses are perfectly real since both are socially used), but that his is more useful for literary criticism than the general usage because it is more precise and nuanced. 3Thus it would make sense to begin defining "poetry" by looking at how people use the term and in particular how it is used in literary discourse. However, though I will pay some attention to what critics actually say and write, I would like primarily to offer certain proposals for refining our use of the term so as to avoid confusion and vagueness. It is not that this investigation will be approaching the real meaning of "poetry," which I have suggested is an imaginary goal, but that it will propose a use of the term constituting a vehicle for talking and writing about poetry that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 151-163 [Access article in PDF] Defining "Poetry" Robert B. Pierce SINCE TERMS ARE THE TOOLS of literary study, it is important to keep these tools in good condition, above all by having clear and functional meanings for them. Notoriously, many critical arguments about texts are in fact differences about terminology, and many confused arguments are built on vague or arbitrarily used terms. Few (...) have been the subject of more critical worrying and infighting than "poetry," 1 and few are more disparately defined. Definitions that are fuzzy or tendentious confuse many a discussion of poetry, and in particular they often narrow our response to the rich variety of the texts in front of us by silently imposing a view of what poetry ought to be. I would like to suggest that a Wittgensteinian approach to meaning can cut through a lot of the difficulty that surrounds the term. The refined understanding of the term "poetry" will result in a certain demystification, but it will dissipate only a false mystery based on confusion, not the real mystery of depth and richness that poetry can offer.What does it mean to approach this issue as a Wittgensteinian? The main principle is that the meaning of a term is its use, the way people deploy it in their speaking and writing, the work that it does. 2 A word does not have an essential core of meaning of which the various social uses are approximations; rather those social uses are the meaning. Thus meaning is a social phenomenon, and the way to determine it is to [End Page 151] look outward at how people use a term, not inward for some presumed mental essence that the term designates. Meaning is conventionally divided into reference and sense. What the term "poetry" refers to is a group of publicly visible things in the social world that we call poems, but there is no distillation in the mind that is the essence of poetry, the sense of the term. Of course we have a sense of the term that controls its range of reference. That sense is made up of our bases for calling one thing poetry and not another: the qualities that incline us to see a text as a poem. Wittgenstein would call these defining qualities criteria. The crucial fact is that they are determined by social processes and so are available to public inspection, not hidden away to be discovered only by introspection.Another observation about what it is to assign meaning to a term is important here. If someone asserts that "poetry" means X, he or she can appropriately be asserting that in fact the offered definition describes how people use the term, or else he or she can be suggesting how the term should or will be used in a specific discourse, that is, offering a definition proposal or stipulative definition. In the latter case the proposer needs to show the utility of the change from ordinary speech for his or her purposes. That is of course what literary critics do when they specify meanings for a term like "tragedy" or "irony" that are different from common usage. It is not that Wayne Booth's way of talking about irony uses the real meaning (both his and the ordinary senses are perfectly real since both are socially used), but that his is more useful for literary criticism than the general usage because it is more precise and nuanced. 3Thus it would make sense to begin defining "poetry" by looking at how people use the term and in particular how it is used in literary discourse. However, though I will pay some attention to what critics actually say and write, I would like primarily to offer certain proposals for refining our use of the term so as to avoid confusion and vagueness. It is not that this investigation will be approaching the real meaning of "poetry," which I have suggested is an imaginary goal, but that it will propose a use of the term constituting a vehicle for talking and writing about poetry that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 151-163 [Access article in PDF] Defining "Poetry" Robert B. Pierce SINCE TERMS ARE THE TOOLS of literary study, it is important to keep these tools in good condition, above all by having clear and functional meanings for them. Notoriously, many critical arguments about texts are in fact differences about terminology, and many confused arguments are built on vague or arbitrarily used terms. Few (...) have been the subject of more critical worrying and infighting than "poetry," 1 and few are more disparately defined. Definitions that are fuzzy or tendentious confuse many a discussion of poetry, and in particular they often narrow our response to the rich variety of the texts in front of us by silently imposing a view of what poetry ought to be. I would like to suggest that a Wittgensteinian approach to meaning can cut through a lot of the difficulty that surrounds the term. The refined understanding of the term "poetry" will result in a certain demystification, but it will dissipate only a false mystery based on confusion, not the real mystery of depth and richness that poetry can offer.What does it mean to approach this issue as a Wittgensteinian? The main principle is that the meaning of a term is its use, the way people deploy it in their speaking and writing, the work that it does. 2 A word does not have an essential core of meaning of which the various social uses are approximations; rather those social uses are the meaning. Thus meaning is a social phenomenon, and the way to determine it is to [End Page 151] look outward at how people use a term, not inward for some presumed mental essence that the term designates. Meaning is conventionally divided into reference and sense. What the term "poetry" refers to is a group of publicly visible things in the social world that we call poems, but there is no distillation in the mind that is the essence of poetry, the sense of the term. Of course we have a sense of the term that controls its range of reference. That sense is made up of our bases for calling one thing poetry and not another: the qualities that incline us to see a text as a poem. Wittgenstein would call these defining qualities criteria. The crucial fact is that they are determined by social processes and so are available to public inspection, not hidden away to be discovered only by introspection.Another observation about what it is to assign meaning to a term is important here. If someone asserts that "poetry" means X, he or she can appropriately be asserting that in fact the offered definition describes how people use the term, or else he or she can be suggesting how the term should or will be used in a specific discourse, that is, offering a definition proposal or stipulative definition. In the latter case the proposer needs to show the utility of the change from ordinary speech for his or her purposes. That is of course what literary critics do when they specify meanings for a term like "tragedy" or "irony" that are different from common usage. It is not that Wayne Booth's way of talking about irony uses the real meaning (both his and the ordinary senses are perfectly real since both are socially used), but that his is more useful for literary criticism than the general usage because it is more precise and nuanced. 3Thus it would make sense to begin defining "poetry" by looking at how people use the term and in particular how it is used in literary discourse. However, though I will pay some attention to what critics actually say and write, I would like primarily to offer certain proposals for refining our use of the term so as to avoid confusion and vagueness. It is not that this investigation will be approaching the real meaning of "poetry," which I have suggested is an imaginary goal, but that it will propose a use of the term constituting a vehicle for talking and writing about poetry that... (shrink)

My brief contribution to this volume is not, strictly speaking, historical. No careful analysis of documents will be offered, no critical apparatus will be supplied, and some measure of descriptive inadequacy is likely to lurk behind it. Yet, it is historical in a broader sense. For it is a reflection – to some extent speculative, I admit – on the rather mysterious paths that connect personal, social, political, and other historical circumstances, on the one hand, to the emergence of new (...) ideas in a particular human mind, on the other. In a sense, this is a reflection on the singularity of the.. (shrink)

Contains the _Poetics _ and the first twelve chapters of the_ Rhetoric_, Book III.

A collection of essays written by pupils, friends and colleagues of Professor Peter Dronke, to honour him on his retirement. The essays address the question of the relationship between poetry and philosophy in the Middle Ages. Contributors include Walter Berschin, Charles Burnett, Stephen Gersh, Michael Herren, Edouard Jeauneau, David Luscombe, Paul Gerhardt Schmidt, Joe Trapp, Jill Mann, Claudio Orlandi and John Marenbon. It is an important collection for both philosophical and literary specialists; scholars, graduate students and under-graduates in Medieval (...) Literature and in Medieval Philosophy. (shrink)

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerfulRita Dove(David Streitfeld, Washington Post, “Laureate for a New Age,” March 19, 1993).The genesis for this special issue arose in a rethin...

In the tenth book of the Republic, Plato famously writes: "There is an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy." In this essay I reflect upon this "quarrel" through an analysis of a passage from Dante's Inferno. I conclude by suggesting that, when employed well, poetry and philosophy complement each other in helping us reflect upon the deep issues of life. (This paper was originally presented at the 19th Annual Conference of Association for Core Texts and Courses) .

"What one cannot compute, one must poetize." So concludes this remarkable sequence of propositions on the centrality of poetry for what we call cognition. Developed through brief, lucid, and eloquent logical elaborations that are punctuated by incisive readings of a range of poems--Western and non-Western, low culture and high--Poetry and Mind offers to theorists and practitioners of literature, together with logicians and cognitive scientists, a more sophisticated account of the extraordinary regimes of human mental experience. Poetry grants (...) us the ability to move "beyond the limits of thought" and to explore the beyond of cognition. It teaches us to think differently. An elliptic response to Wittgenstein's point of arrival in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, this book is first and foremost an interdisciplinary study of poetry, drawing on literary, philosophical, and scientific traditions. The work conducted on minds and brains over the last decades in psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience cannot be ignored if, as humanists, we are interested in the way we think. Dubreuil thus calls for a constant dialogue with the positive examination of cognition to better situate the normal regimes of thought, as well as to underline the other mental possibilities that literature opens up. Poetry and Mind shows that poetry--a widespread and perhaps universal phenomenon among humans--arises through syntactic structures, cognitive binding, and mental regulations, but that, in going through them, it also exceeds them. The best poems, then, are not only thought experiments but actual thinking experiments for the unthinkable. They expand the usual semantics of natural languages, and singularly deploy the rhetorical armature of speech. Made of iterations and linguistic reorganizations, they exceed their own algorithms and, often, they become reflexive, strange, and cognitively dissonant. They provide detachable, movable, and livable significations to our selves. The literary scope of this book is more than "global": it is uniquely broad and comparative, encompassing dozens of different traditions, oral or written, from all continents, from Ancient times to the contemporary era, with some thirty specific readings of texts, ranging from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, from Wang Wei to Aimé Césaire, and from cuneiform tablet to rap music. Together, Dubreuil's readings and elaborations offer a major reappraisal of the relations between creation, language and our embodied brains."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Ernst Jünger is known for his war writings, but is largely ignored by contemporary phenomenologists. In this essay, I explore his e Adventurous Heart which has recently been made available in English. is work consists of a set of fragments which, when related, disclose a coherent ow of philosophical thinking. Speci cally, I show that, beneath a highly poetic and obscure prose, Jünger posits how subjective experience and poetry allow individuals to realize truth. I relate parts of Jünger’s insights (...) to contributions by Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, arguing that Jünger o ers a unique and valuable contribution to the phenomenological discipline. (shrink)