Connecting poetry and philosophy of language, Philip Mills bridges the continental and analytical divide by bringing together the writings of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Through an expressivist philosophy of poetry, he argues that we can understand some of the core questions in the philosophy of language. Mills highlights the continuity of poetic language with ordinary language, and positions Nietzsche and Wittgenstein's thinking as the clearest way to expand the philosophy of poetry. By tracing the expressivist tradition of philosophy of language, this (...) study locates its roots in German Romanticism right through to the work of contemporary expressivists such as Huw Price and Robert Brandom. Where poetry has been difficult to grasp with the traditional philosophical tools used by aestheticians, A Poetic Philosophy of Language operates at the crossroads between philosophy of art and language, proposing a new philosophy of poetry with wide-ranging potentialities. (shrink)

Literature finds the best expression when literary aesthetics and philosophy run side by side. The former offers the external charm, while the latter inculcates the more profound implication with the aim of providing it with a superior stature and permanence. Jayadeva’s Gitagovindam, being a colossal work in the field of Vaishnava literature, does contain the brilliant juxtaposition of both. This article attempts to show how Jayadeva’s Gitagovindam, a colossal work in the field of Vaishnava literature, does contain the brilliant juxtaposition (...) of both. On the one hand, like a typical lyrical poem, its melodic nature does have a soothing effect and on the other, the use of philosophy instils in it a greater depth and seriousness to uplift itself as a book of devotion and religious inspiration. Moreover, the importance of this Holy Scripture lies in the fact that it not only played a significant role in paving the way to form a new sect in the Vaishnava religion, known as ‘Gaudiya Vaishnavism’, but also showed the later Vaishnava lyricists the art of portraying in words the amorous love of Lord Krishna and Radha with compassion and tears. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Poetics is the first philosophical account of an art form and is the foundational text in the history of aesthetics. The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics is an accessible guide to this often dense and cryptic work. Angela Curran introduces and assesses: Aristotle’s life and the background to the Poetics the ideas and text of the Poetics , including mimēsis ; poetic technē; the definition of tragedy; the elements of poetic composition; the (...) Poetics’ recommendations for tragic plot patterns; catharsis ; epic and comedy; the nature of our emotional response to drama; the proper pleasure of tragedy; and the role that art plays in a human life the relevance of Aristotle’s work in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and philosophical psychology to the Poetics a comparison of Plato and Aristotle on the value of mimetic art the continuing importance of Aristotle’s Poetics to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of film. (shrink)

Today’s critic must be something of a philosopher as well as a poet. Yet her workremains above all that of the close reader, and the emergence of the valuesembodied by the close reader to stand alongside those of the philosopher andthe poet may be one of the most significant intellectual developments to emergein the post–World War II years.This book analyzes the language poets, Deleuze and Guattari, and above allBenjamin and Derrida, to trace the various dimensions of the task of the (...) critic.It concludes with a major chapter on the significance of Derrida’s recent workfor the conceptualization of religion, and with an Afterword examining therole of the Romantic discourse of the fragment in the archeology of all thesediscursive strands.The task of the critic, now invited to pass through the discourses ofphilosophy, poetry, and religion beyond that of close reading, has neverbeen harder—nor have we ever been more in need of it. (shrink)

Rhythm is the fundamental pulse that animates poetry, music, and dance across all cultures. And yet the recent explosion of scholarly interest across disciplines in the aural dimensions of aesthetic experience--particularly in sociology, cultural and media theory, and literary studies--has yet to explore this fundamental category. This book furthers the discussion of rhythm beyond the discrete conceptual domains and technical vocabularies of musicology and prosody. With original essays by philosophers, psychologists, musicians, literary theorists, and ethno-musicologists, The Philosophy of Rhythm opens (...) up wider-and plural-perspectives, examining formal affinities between the historically interconnected fields of music, dance, and poetry, while addressing key concepts such as embodiment, movement, pulse, and performance. Volume editors Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison bring together a range of key questions: What is the distinction between rhythm and pulse? What is the relationship between everyday embodied experience, and the specific experience of music, dance, and poetry? Can aesthetics offer an understanding of rhythm that helps inform our responses to visual and other arts, as well as music, dance, and poetry? And, what is the relation between psychological conceptions of entrainment, and the humane concept of rhythm and meter? Overall, The Philosophy of Rhythm appeals across disciplinary boundaries, providing a unique overview of a neglected aspect of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

This article presents the conceptual groundwork for a “poetics of the self” by theorizing how and why a creative praxis rooted in Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will and hermeneutics of the living metaphor contributes to an individual’s on-going development of self-awareness. Its focus is on the affective fragility that manifests in an individual’s intermediary status of polarities – finitude and infinitude, freedom and nature – in conjunction with Ricœur’s tensional status of metaphorical truth. The act of writing poetry, it (...) suggests, can be an aesthetic mediation that develops insight into the primordial discord of the servile will. (shrink)

The paper starts with reflections on Plato’s critique of the poets and the preference many express for Aristotle’s view of poetry. The second part of the paper takes a case study of analytic treatments of ancient philosophy, including the ancient philosopher poets, to examine the poetics of analytic philosophy, diagnosing a preference in Analytic philosophy for a clean non-poetic style of presentation, and then develops this in considering how well historians of philosophy in the Analytic tradition can accommodate the (...) contributions of philosophers who wrote in verse. The final part of the paper reviews the current enthusiasm for decoding Empedocles’ vague and poetic descriptions of the cosmic cycle into a precise scientific periodicity on the basis of the recently discovered Byzantine scholia on Aristotle. I argue that this enthusiasm speaks to a desire for definite and clear numerical values in place of poetic motifs of give and take, and that this mathematical and scientific poetic is comparable to the preferred poetic of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Kantian Symbol The Schopenhauerian Metaphor? The Schopenhauerian Metonymy Gracián's Poetics and Schopenhauer as Poetic Metaphysician Conclusion References.

This anthology is the first study of the philosophy of narrative in the analytic tradition. Brings together eleven articles exploring narrative, metaphysics and epistemology, character, and emotion Examines various narrative art forms, including painting and comics The first of a new series of books published in association with the _Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism_.

T. S. Eliot's mind encompasses just about every important avant-garde intellectual movement of his time. His thought, as well as his poetry, represents an essential and original achievement within Modernism. This study presents Eliot's unique synthesis of contemporary philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and studies in mysticism, and demonstrates how it is responsible for the nature of his religious belief, the basic tenets of his literary theory, and the figurative, structural, and dramatic aspects of his verse, pervading virtually everything he wrote throughout (...) his life. The chapters are Skepticism, Mysticism, The Unconscious, Primitive Experience, Mythic Consciousness, and A Surrealist Poetic. (shrink)

There is a growing interest in the application of creative writing in the treatment of mental illness. Nonpharmacological approaches have shown that access to poetic, creative language can allow for the verbalisation of illness experiences, as well as for self-expressions that can include other facets of the subject outside of the disease. In particular, creative writing in a safe group context has proven to be of particular importance. In this article, we present a pilot on a creative writing group for (...) young adults in treatment for psychosis. We set the texts and experiences from the writing group in dialogue with Paul Ricoeur’s and Julia Kristeva’s philosophies onpoetic languageas meaning making and part of subject formation. The focus is on language as materiality and potentiality and on the patient’s inherent linguistic resources as founded in a group dynamic. As a whole, the project seeks to give an increased theoretical and empirical understanding of the potentiality of language and creativity for healing experiences, participation and meaning-making processes among vulnerable people. Furthermore, a practice founded in poetic language might critically address both the general and biomedical understanding of the subject and disease. (shrink)

Although Aristotle's Poetics is the most frequently read of his works, philosophers and political theorists have, for the most part, left analysis of the text to literary critics and classicists. In this book Michael Davis argues convincingly that in addition to teaching us something about poetry, Poetics contains an understanding of the common structure of human action and human thought that connects it to Aristotle's other writings on politics and morality. Davis demonstrates that the duality of Poetics (...) reaches out to the philosopher, writer, and political theorist and shows the importance of the ideal in our imaginings of and goals for the future. (shrink)

This paper discusses an important phase in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analytic philosophy through a comparative examination of the profound correspondences that exist between his concept of silence and the poetics of another crucial authorial figure of the 20th century: James Joyce. Based on the hypothesis that there are striking resemblances between their early works, that is, between Joyce’s realistic short-story collection Dubliners and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the article employs mostly close-reading, analytical-interpretative and comparative methods. It argues that silence was an (...) intentional intellectual, aesthetic and ethical choice of both these authors, their way to preserve the autonomy of metaphysics and to honour the beauty of the unspoken. Starting from their common critical treatment of the habitual and largely alienated speech, the discussion connects Wittgenstein’s philosophical attitudes regarding the imprecision and inadequacy of every-day language and Joyce’s notion of ‘spiritual paralysis’ of the city-life, which he saw as the main motive for writing his collection about fin-desiècle Dublin. On the grounds of their shared views about the limits of words, behind which there are worlds that cannot be properly uttered, the idea of silence – or the highly significant narrative absence – grows to permeate the work of both. In the case of Wittgenstein, it is a call for a new philosophy, or anti-philosophy, which in negating metaphysics in effect preserves its independence from a discursive speech which cannot express it, whereas in the case of Joyce, correspondingly (and almost simultaneously), it is a quest for a new literary mode that will foreground a particular Modernist allusiveness, rhetoric of omission and deliberately incomplete, gnomonical narrative structures. (shrink)

The essays in this volume discuss the life and work of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, exploring the context of his thought, the relationship between his work on science and on poetry, and his approach to language. Contents: include: 1. "Bachelard in the Context of a Century of Philosophy of Science," by Colin Smith; 2. "Gaston Bachelard: Phenomenologist of Modern Science," by Alfons Grieder; 3. "Gaston Bachelard and Ferdinand Gonseth: Philosophers of Scientific Dialectics," by Henri Lauener; 4. "Science and Poetry in (...) the Ontology of Human Freedom: Bachelard's Account of the Poetic and the Scientific Imagination," by Noel Parker; 5. "Bachelard and the Refusal of Metaphor," by Jean-Claude Margolin; 6. "The Place of Alchemy in Bachelard's Oneiric Criticism," by John G. Clark; "Unfixing the Subject: Gaston Bachelard and Reading," by Mary McAllester. Co-published with the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the problematic of "care of the self" in the unpublished later work of Michel Foucault. In his major published works, Foucault studied how subjects are fabricated within relations of power and knowledge. He revealed that modern political power is a "bio-power." Its legitimacy derives from its capacity to nurture individual life. It does this by forging individuals whose bodies, capacities, pleasures, comforts, desires, etc., are intrinsically integrated into the state's productive force. One of the main techniques for (...) bringing about this integration is to incite individuals to talk about their desire, to think of themselves as subjects of desire. This practice of reflecting on oneself in order to acquire and express self-knowledge is "hermeneutic" in nature. It uncovers the hidden truth of the individual. Through this hermeneutic practice individuals fashion their subjectivity around the discovery, expression, liberation and fulfillment of their true desire. Foucault shows that this subject of desire first emerges within the confessional practices and spiritual exercises of Christian ethics. However, his work also revealed that prior to the formation of Christian practices a whole range of possible experiences of ethical subjectivity was to be found in ancient philosophy---relations and practices which were not hermeneutic. ;I argue that Foucault's genealogy seeks to historicize our particular formulation of self-knowledge as a hermeneutic of desire. He finds in ancient philosophy an experience of subjectivity that was "aesthetic" and "poetic" rather than hermeneutic. The foundation of ancient philosophy was the practice of "care of the self" in a philosophical life. This dissertation shows that in his lectures at the College de France from 1982--1984, Foucault develops an ethics of care of the self as a response to modern bio-power and the hermeneutics of desire. His genealogy of philosophy reveals a multiplicity of practices of care of the self and self-knowledge. Rather than being an effect of bio-power, or a true desire, the self of care is a material to be formed and a task to be accomplished. (shrink)

What is it about the nature of "soul" that makes it so difficult to adequately capture its complexity in a strictly discursive account? Why do some of the most profound human experiences elude our attempts to theorize them? How can a written document do justice to the dynamic activity of thinking, as opposed to merely presenting a collection of thoughts-as-artifacts? Finally, what can we learn about the activity of philosophizing, and about the human soul, by reflecting on the possibilities and (...) limitations of writing? These concerns, in various forms and in different registers, have preoccupied Michael Davis throughout his distinguished career. This volume is in honor of, and in dialogue with, Davis's work, which spans ancient philosophy and literature, continental philosophy and political philosophy. It includes original essays by numerous distinguished scholars in the fields of philosophy and political science. The remarkable range and caliber of the contributions attest to the breadth and depth of Davis's influence. The essays in Part I of the volume explore the nature of soul through the lens of tragedy. Part II consists of three essays that explore the human longing for perfect knowledge and completion--and the obstacles to the fulfilment of that longing--in relation to the divine. In Part III, the essays address the distinctive challenges of the political sphere and philosophy's relation to it. And while the relationship between philosophy and poetry is an implicit theme throughout the volume, the essays in Part IV focus directly on philosophy's aestheticizing tendencies. Many different philosophical and literary works are discussed throughout these chapters, including ancient works such as Plato's Republic, Euthydemus and Laws, Homer's Iliad, and Euripides' Trojan Women, as well as works by modern philosophers such as Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In addition, three essays analyze some of Shakespeare's plays in relation to the thought of Plato and Machiavelli. All of the essays are thematically linked by a common thread as they attend to the poetic dimension of philosophical thinking. Michael Davis is Professor of Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College, where he has taught since 1977 and has been the Sarah Yates Exley Chair in Teaching Excellence (2003-2005). He has also taught on the graduate faculty at Fordham University and the New School for Social Research. He is the author of numerous articles and books, which include: Ancient Tragedy and the Origins of Modern Science; The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics; The Politics of Philosophy: A Commentary on Aristotle's Politics; The Autobiography of Philosophy; Rousseau's The Reveries of the Solitary Walker; Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education; and The Soul of the Greeks: An Inquiry. He is also co-translator (with Seth Benardete) of Aristotle's On Poetics. Contributors include: Abraham Anderson, Jonathan Badger, Robert Berman, Ronna Burger, Kenneth DeLuca, Gwenda-lin Grewal, Scott Hemmenway, Paul Kirkland, Mary Nichols, Denise Schaeffer, Paul Stern, Richard Velkley, Lisa Pace Vetter, Ann Ward, Lee Ward, Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert. About the Editor: Denise Schaeffer is Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross. She is the author of Rousseau on Education, Freedom and Judgment and contributing co-editor (with Christopher Dustin) of Socratic Philosophy and Its Others. She is co-editor (with Gregory McBrayer and Mary P. Nichols) of the Focus Philosophical Library edition of Plato's Euthydemus, for which she authored the Introduction and co-authored the Interpretive Essay. (shrink)

The Denktagebuch, kept by Hannah Arendt from 1950 until 1973, is not only a fascinating parergon, or secondary work, containing many reflections, observations, and notes on other articles that had not, or not yet, taken on their finished form as essays or books. It presents the foundations and premises of her writing that originate from her notebooks—foundations in a literal sense, i.e., those writings that preceded the author's work in political theory. Several entries contain methodological reflections, explanations of definitions, and (...) analyses of philosophical texts. These are self-commentaries on her own publications, such as reflections on the ambiguous and often…. (shrink)

In order to grasp the distinctive character of the object imitated in tragedies, Aristotle's Poetics introduces a new notion of action, which does not refer to individual ethical deeds as in the Ethics. Rather, it signifies a whole with a beginning, a middle, and an end, whose constitutive components are events. This paper argues that the notion of agents undergoes a parallel transformation in the treatise on poetry. It no longer refers exclusively to the authors of ethical deeds, but (...) to the characters who enact the entire dramatic action. Their nature can be understood in terms of a potential story whose logos is a muthos. On this ground, the suggestion is made that the Poetics provides the elements of a narrative conception of human identity. (shrink)

This collection offers new perspectives on the interdisciplinary scope of the historic avant-garde and highlights the interconnectedness of its artists from a variety of national and disciplinary perspectives.

Is there a poetic ground in Peirce's philosophy? While this question may sound interesting, it is somehow odd, as Peirce is well–known as a logician, and it is also known by scholars that he was not an expert in poetry, literature, art, or even theories concerning art in general. This paper hypothesizes that there is a starting point in his philosophy that is poetical in its nature. Moreover, Peirce's system is obviously logical in its form, but also keeps the spirit (...) of the original silent feeling of poetry that seems to have fascinated him. Also, I claim there is a Schellingian heritage in Peirce's philosophy that is partially responsible for that poetic starting point. This idea also has, as a support, the supposition that a realistic view of the world provides a hypothesis of symmetry between the human and natural worlds, which provides the basic form for his ontological theories and for the theoretical harmony among Peirce's doctrines. This quality of Peirce's philosophy is a kind of a Greek beauty that is only evident for those who can view his thought not in fragments but as a complex system that has the potency of not only answering classical philosophical questions, but also of giving rise to a new philosophy which needs to be further developed. (shrink)