Abstract

Plato's rhetorical gesture invoking a 'quarrel' between philosophy and poetry points to a deep problem in our conception of rational discourse, often obscured or displaced in the history of philosophy's relations with imaginative literature, especially with respect to analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Recent developments have helped focus attention on the overlap between philosophy and literature, which the contemporary retreat from philosophy's 'narrative turn' does little to undermine. Further work in the philosophy of language, the logic of the imagination, and the relations between dialectic and rhetoric promise to throw light on that ancient problem.