Philosophy and Poetry is the 33rd volume in the Midwest Studies in Philosophy series. It begins with contributions in verse from two world class poets, JohnAshbery and Stephen Dunn, and an article by Dunn on the creative processthat issued in his poem. The volume features new work from an internationalcollection of philosophers exploring central philosophical issues pertinent topoetry as well as the connections between the two domains.

Philosophy certainly has connections with science but it is not itself a science. Nor is it literature. But it is related to literature in a way that excessive emphasis on science can obscure. In this paper I defend the rather old-fashioned view that philosophy is essentially linguistic. I also argue, less conventionally, that there is an unavoidable personal aspect to at least some philosophical problems, and in answering them we must speak for ourselves without being able to count (...) on every other speaker of our language agreeing with us or even understanding what we say. Where the rules of our language are not set we must, so to speak, make them up for ourselves as we go. In this way philosophy requires the kind of linguistic creativity more often associated with poetical kinds of literature. Drawing on the work of Cora Diamond and Alice Crary, I argue that philosophy should be regarded as, not identical with, but continuous with poetry. (shrink)

Now available in paperback, ____The Quarrel Between Philosophy__ ____and Poetry__ focuses on the theoretical and practical suppositions of the long-standing conflict between philosophy and poetry. Stanley Rosen--one of the leading Plato scholars of our day--examines philosophical activity, questioning whether technical philosophy is a species of poetry, a political program, an interpretation of human existence according to the ideas of 19th and 20th-century thinkers, or a contemplation of beings and Being.

This book explores the pervasiveness of poetry's impact on philosophy and, conversely, how philosophy has sometimes resisted or denied poetry's influence.

The book explores three specific areas: the practice of writing with respect to orality; the interpretive modes of poetic and philosophical discourse as self ...

Professor Brett has some direct acquaintance with a Joint Honours Degree in English Literature and Philosophy: and it is therefore on the basis of his own experience that he warns us that poetry and philosophy are “difficult pursuits for any man to combine” . This book has an introductory chapter and a short epilogue which deal in a philosophical way with meaning in poetry and in imaginative literature generally and with the nature of critical interpretation.In the (...) four middle chapters the author gives his account of four well-known and much discussed poems: Lycidas, the Essay on Man, the Ancient Mariner and the Four Quartets . One could imagine these chapters presented independently as interpretations and discussions of the literary and historical background of the poems: but they certainly illustrate Mr. Brett's theory of meaning in poetry and this provides a certain unity. Parts of Chapter I were first published by the author in Philosophy . What is new is the particular application of the theory to didactic and discursive poetry. To this is now added a discussion of rival theories of interpretation: first, the view expressed by Wimsatt and Beardsley in “The Intentional Fallacy” ; and, second, the views expressed by Miss Kathleen Raine in her essay on Blake. (shrink)

I. Language is a witness of change in the field of the knowledge. In its system of signs, also the “traces” that show “the movement of the signs” are conserved, meaning those dynamic signs that indicate problems and solutions of problems, and sometimes even the invention of new problems, which modify the paradigms of knowledge. In the case of the creativity problem, if we take language as the witness, we see the following: 1. In the first half of the 20 (...) th century, the term used to denote the innovatory phenomena is that of creation. This notion refers, most often, to the artistic works, but is step by step extended also to denote the great scientific discoveries or technical inventions and, more seldom, other types of activities which bear the mark of novelty or originality, generally with an “out of the ordinary character” . The word has an obvious value content and exactly by its evaluative significance, it is disseminated in the current cultural vocabulary. It can have more general meanings, due to the fact that it keeps, in its semantic memory, the archaic layers of the myths of creation, but also because it can be resignified metaphysically, as a cosmogony principle or one of the evolution of life . But its established place in the philosophical discourse is found mostly in the area of the philosophy of culture or in that of the philosophy of value and especially in the philosophy of art. From here, it is overtaken by the art sciences, as the psychology of art, the history of art or the sociology of art. The term creation means both the works, the products of the creation process, and the processes through which these works are accomplished. In the analysis of the creation process, the significance of the term become more psychological, and the rationalization to which it is subjected to seems to furthen it both from its religious origin as well as from the Romantic mythology of the genius. However, if we regard more attentively, we see that terms as “inspiration”, “incubation” or “invention”, from the so called explanations of the creation process, preserve the magic obscurity of the enigma. Generally, the idea of creation, even totally transferred to the human sphere, secularized, rationalized and psychologized, still keeps something from the history of a notion charged with “mystery”, “heroic admiration” and a sort of “sacred terror”, which can be understood by considering the religious origin of the idea of creation; because about creation, in the human sphere, it has been commenced to be talked at first by analogy to the divine creation, in the discourse about art of the Renaissance, and the semantic evolution of the notion has not, for a long time, furthen itself from it spiritual root. Creation – even when it denotes the human products- still remains a metaphor- which transports to something difficult to comprehend, rather than facilitates the understanding of what it denotes. 2. After the middle of the 20 th century, a new term, creativity, makes its way in the discourse, replacing the word creation. It comes from the vocabulary of the humanistic sciences, firstly from psychology and afterward by the other sciences which adopted it. It becomes, in a short period, a frequent term of the cultural world and of public communication. The discourse in which this neologism appears has completely changed suppositions: a). Firstly, it is a discourse of scientific nature ; b). Secondly, its notions are descriptive: creativity denotes the capacity to produce innovative works in any domain and is seen as a generally human dimension ; the creative products are described following criteria such as novelty, originality, relevance, adequacy or utility, attributes that are intelligible but also rationally computable. c). Thirdly, the suppositions of the discourse on creativity contains the idea that the creative phenomena can be understood rationally, described, analyzed, explained and measured, and their knowledge can be applied in the so called techniques to stimulate creativity or transferred in the methods of learning and education. The notion of creativity indicates thus a discourse articulated on a type of representations which we could call positive, to mark this way the change in knowledge on which they are based. 3. In the last decades of the 20 th century, in the vocabulary of the sciences on creativity appears a new notion: creatology . According to the significance that results from the terms which compose this linguistic invention, creatology can denote, in a general sense, the study or the theory of creation or creativity, accomplished in a discipline or other from the sciences which assumed it as a research problem. Still, the discussions on creatology have requested more - the constituting of an autonomous discipline of creativity. These three notions – creation, creativity and creatology - have an obvious “family resemblance”, although, as we have seen, the semantic differences are significant. Through these notions we can reconstruct not only the history of a problem which appeared as important to the knowledge of the 20 th century, but perhaps even the history of some ideas which have accompanied the understanding of the cultural history or, wider, the history of the mentalities of the 20 th century. It is exactly why the emergence of creatology can be researched from the perspective of cultural analysis. 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This short article pairs the realms of “Mathematics”, “Philosophy”, and “Poetry”, presenting some corners of intersection of this type of scientocreativity. Poetry have long been following mathematical patterns expressed by stern formal restrictions, as the strong metrical structure of ancient Greek heroic epic, or the consistent meter with standardized rhyme scheme and a “volta” of Italian sonnets. Poetry was always connected to Philosophy, and further on, notable mathematicians, like the inventor of quaternions, William Rowan Hamilton, (...) or Ion Barbu, the creator of the Barbilian spaces, have written appreciated poems. We will focus here on an avant-garde movement in literature, art, philosophy, and science, called Paradoxism, founded in Romania in 1980 by a mathematician, philosopher and poet, and on the laboured writing exercises of the Oulipo group, founded in Paris in 1960 by mathematicians and poets, both of them still in act. (shrink)

_Philosophy and Poetry_ is the 33rd volume in the _Midwest Studies in Philosophy_ series. It begins with contributions in verse from two world class poets, JohnAshbery and Stephen Dunn, and an article by Dunn on the creative processthat issued in his poem. The volume features new work from an internationalcollection of philosophers exploring central philosophical issues pertinent topoetry as well as the connections between the two domains.

Called the “greatest philosophical essayist of his time,” Rorty is both famous and notorious in academic philosophy for his uniquely engaging writing style. While his fellow analytic philosophers look askance at his flamboyant prose, suspicious that it lacks the care and precision that their discipline demands, literary intellectuals who champion the essay genre can have their qualms about Rorty as well: his work is too professional and specialized to be properly called essays. I argue not only that Rorty's work (...) fits into the essay genre, but also that his use of the essay form is integral to his rhetorical project of advancing his ideal of pragmatic liberalism. Rorty writes essays because the essay is a pragmatic literary genre: it is anti‐essentialist, conversational, and experimentalist and provocatively aims at “breaking the crust of convention,” in Dewey's phrase. Using the essay, Rorty “joshes” us to becoming more pragmatic and, therefore, better liberals. (shrink)

The Lonely Labyrinth winds the suggestion that "Kierkegaard was a profoundly sick man, and that the character of his sickness established a privileged perspective for the understanding of his work." In the light of this thesis, his "works turn out to be, not abstruse theologico-philosophical treatises or mysterious aesthetic essays, but successive moves in a complicated dialectic of therapy." They are "efforts... to find not truth but health." Part One of Thompson's book sketches the biographical, psychological, philosophical, and literary background (...) of Kierkegaard's authorship. Part Two--the major division of the book--offers readings of the pseudonymous works from Either/or through Concluding Unscientific Postscript. (shrink)

The postmodern human lives in a quest condition. Poetry and philosophy, as forms that integrate, shape, and deposit the sacred, are part of the instruments used by postmoderns to fulfill their need for communication and personal accomplishment. Although they use different means to construe reality, poetry and philosophy may serve a common end goal – to disclose philosophy as the art of living. As communication practice, philosophy and poetry are based on an expanded (...) rationality involving the rational extended to the sphere of the significance and hidden sense of existence. In other words, expanded rationality presupposes cultivating a symbolic consciousness that is adequate to the daily reality of human needs. To showcase the intimate relationship between philosophical reflection and poetic creation, I provide a short presentation of the poetry belonging to a Romanian poet, Rodica Dragomir. Her poems are an example of the quest for authenticity by means of the metaphysical stirring of existence. (shrink)

Here I look at sundry aspects of the current controversy about Generative AI and, in particular, the implications of this new and rapidly evolving technology for poetry, the arts, and human creativity in general. My essay looks at earlier episodes in the history of thought, from Descartes on, that I take to have prefigured this latest debate around 'the human' in relation to its various physical, 'artificial,' or (presumptively) prosthetic means of extension and refinement. I also discuss its bearing (...) on literary-critical issues concerning the formal or structural aspects of poetry, the role (if any) of authorial intent, and the extent to which criticism enters into– and might lay claim to a stake in–what counts as human creativity. A central point of reference is William Empson's 1930 book, Seven Types of Ambiguity, where these issues are raised in a strikingly prescient way through his practice of close-focused textual analysis allied to great philosophical acuity. I conclude that a priori attitudinizing, pro or con, is not much use in this context, but that poets, critics, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and AI researchers need to cooperate in the reexamination of many long-standing but now highly contestable distinctions. (shrink)

This article concerns the ‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’. With the guidance of Leo Strauss, and with reference to French cultural anthropology and the Hebrew Bible, I offer close readings of the origin myths told by the characters of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium and Socrates in book 2 of the Republic. I contrast Aristophanes’ prudential and political esotericism with Socrates’ pedagogical esotericism, connecting the former with poetry’s affirmation of the primacy of chaos and the latter with (...) philosophy’s openness to the measures of nature or phusis. Aristophanes regards the political poetry of Olympianism as a necessary corrective of original human disorder, while Socrates traces the sickness of souls and cities to an excess of poiēsis, ‘poetry’ or ‘production’ in all of its cultural and material senses. The quarrel between Socrates and Aristophanes illuminates fundamental questions that were of central concern to Strauss: What is the status of nature? Must we orient ourselves by the forceful impressions of culture, or can we make out natural standards of how to live? Is war the primary human condition, or peace? Are human beings essentially erotic, or thumotic? Is philosophy an expression of reckless boldness, or of saving moderation? (shrink)

In Art of the Ordinary, Deming brings together the arts, philosophy, and psychology in new and compelling ways so as to offer generative, provocative insights into how we think and represent the world to others as well as to ourselves.

Stanley Rosen's latest book is a collection of essays, the first of which gives the collection its title. The essays are undated, presumably as a way of emphasizing their continuity, but are said to "have been written at various times during the past thirty years" ; some of them are published here for the first time. Although most are on Plato, two are on Aristotle, and two on contemporary continental philosophy. The collection displays Rosen's considerable skill at wide-ranging, scholarly, (...) and insightful philosophical interpretation and criticism, in the service of a fundamental concern about the nature and possibilities of philosophy. It is undoubtedly the best introduction to his work as a whole. The following summaries, necessarily inadequate, observe the order in which the essays appear in the book. (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)

Frontiers of Consciousness is a study of the problem of consciousness in a historic period of revolutionary change, and an authentic example of “interdisciplinary studies.” The book contains a wealth of insight into the conceptual interrelationships between the work of the American philosophers who have been called the Builders (William James, Josiah Royce, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey) and the work of three great modernist poets (T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams).

In this study, Levin explores Plato's engagement with the Greek literary tradition in his treatment of key linguistic issues. This investigation, conjoined with a new interpretation of the Republic's familiar critique of poets, supports the view that Plato's work represents a valuable precedent for contemporary reflections on ways in which philosophy might benefit from appeals to literature.

Babette Babich is already known for her previous work on Nietzsche; in this, her third book, she focuses more on Nietzsche and Heidegger than Hölderlin, even though the book's title derives from a verse by Hölderlin in which the poet refers to "words, like flowers" . The reference to blood is borrowed from Zarathustra, who only loved what was "written with blood" . We follow the poetic dimensions of these two philosophers' works and their understanding of art, music, and consequently, (...) beauty and tragedy. The poetics and poems of Hölderlin have influenced the two philosophers; in some cases, Babich situates the key explanation of some Nietzschean formulas in his quotes or epigraphs taken from Hölderlin . Eight of the fourteen chapters were previously published in earlier versions. (shrink)

The relations of philosophy and poetry include but are not exhausted by Plato’s hostility to mimetic poetry in the Republic and Aristotle’s defence of it in the Poetics. For poetry has often carried a philosophical message itself, from the work of Chaucer and Milton to that of T.S. Eliot. In yet earlier generations, poetry was chosen as the medium for conveying a philosophical message by (among Greek philosophers) Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles, and (at Rome) by (...) Lucretius, who struggled both with the Latin language and with the standard metre of didactic poetry, hexameters, to spread what he considered enlightenment and to reach for his Epicureanism an audience that might otherwise have remained unreached. To the extent that poets such as Lucretius succeeded, the philosophical critics of poetry in the tradition of Plato would have to recognise merit in some mimetic poetry. (Thus Lucretius compares clouds of atoms to flocks of sheep, which he graphically depicts.) Yet a defence of poetry other than Aristotelian katharsis would be needed for works such as those of Empedocles and Lucretius. Perhaps Enlightenment can be conveyed equally well in verse as in prose, mimetic components notwithstanding; for some purposes perhaps itcan be conveyed uniquely well. De nihilo nil fit, to quote Lucretius, comprises an example. (shrink)

_A philosophical exploration of the power that poetry, music, and the erotic have on us._.

The necessary relation of philosophy and poetry in Schellingʼs philosophy is most clearly visible in the way he attributes the aesthetic function to philosophy in his work System of transcendental idealism. For Schelling, poetry is what precedes science, which, in terms of the system of science, must in its circular motion return at its completion to what it came from. What leads science to the return to poetry can be found, according to Schelling, in (...) nature and in the way that it is organised. The organisation in nature was in ancient philosophy portrayed through poetic expression in the form of stories. For Schelling, the mythological form is therefore the middle ground, which leads to the return of science to poetry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Some Aspects of Christian Mystical Rhetoric, Philosophy, and PoetryRyan J. StarkThis is an article about poets and poetic philosophers who make spirited arguments. My purpose in particular is to clarify the nature of mystical rhetoric, which needs to be distinguished from secular rhetoric (i.e., “secular” as nonspiritual). As ways of existing in language, they are ontologically incommensurable, and we should treat them as such. Mystical rhetoric is that (...) into which Spirit enters, conveying to both writer and reader some aspect of providential kairos that cannot otherwise be attained. That is, God completes mystical inferences. God participates, illuminating the hearts of those who open themselves to grace through faith. Or, in other words, writers and readers who want to enter into numinous arguments must shelve the hermeneutics of suspicion. An overly critical stance actually diminishes the possibility of insight, even if it is well intended, much like nervous backseat driving, which—though aimed at producing safety—inevitably works against it. I am not suggesting, however, that skeptics are at a complete loss when approaching mystical rhetorical situations. Rather, they simply do not grasp the metaphysical, enchanted, or occult dimensions of the discourses at work, because they have closed themselves off to Spirit or—more commonly—have attempted to transmogrify Spirit into secular concepts, which distorts spirited language and leads to mischaracterizations of religious experience.1 In contrast, I provide a Christian approach to [End Page 260] mystical rhetoric, one that neither discounts nor sidesteps the real presence of the supernatural.Inspired Rhetoric and HermeneuticsFuror poeticus is a key element of mystical persuasion. The phrase literally means “poetical fury,” and the idea behind it in a Christian framework is that the Holy Spirit aids writers in creating imaginative texts (e.g., sonnets, sermons, essays, novels, blogs, etc.) or, in pernicious instances, demons aid writers.2 In either case, a mysterious force helps the author to compose. Moreover, furor touches readers or listeners, a point seldom emphasized but nonetheless central to this sublime practice of composition. Inspired writing requires inspired reading: furor poeticus needs furor lectoris.3 The Spirit aids readers in understanding mystical rhetoric, as long as those readers participate earnestly in the discourse. John Milton (1674, 7.31), for example, famously envisions such a “fit audience” in the third invocation to the Muse in Paradise Lost (i.e., the “great Argument”), where he calls on the reader for hermeneutical verve, a spirited reading to complement his enthusiastic writing. Søren Kierkegaard also writes to an audience capable of spiritually minded hermeneutics, allowing him to perform various edifying dissimulations through pseudonyms: the despairing aesthete, the unscrupulous seducer, the rigid moralist, and so forth. These inspired writers expect believing readers to contribute to their works, to complete their disputations, in fact, through spirited exegesis. Their methods of composition demand it, which is to say that writers touched by furor leave little room in their arguments for the sustainable disposition of the uninspired reader.Cicero explains spirited rhetoric and hermeneutics in De divinatione, where Quintus talks about how inspired readers experience the same type of furor as inspired writers, seers, and prophets: “Men capable of correctly interpreting all these signs of the future seem to approach very near the divine spirit of the gods whose will they interpret, just as scholars do when they interpret the poets” (1938, 226). Scholarship, in other words, is capable of tapping into mystical energy, making the scholars as prophetic as the vates on which they write. In the second book of On Christian Doctrine (1958, 75–78), Augustine also explains the importance of mystical exegesis as a form of prophecy, where sincere readers undergo the same type of inspiration as mystical writers. For Augustine, spirited reading begins with prayer and ends with revelation. In both accounts of furor, Cicero’s and Augustine’s, [End Page 261] the inspired audience and the inspired writer together experience rapture, a divine vision or illumination, which is precisely the type of communion that occurs during mystical discourses.4Still, the idea of seeking communion with God is potentially unsettling. The notion produces anxieties of psychosis, possession, and self-erasure. Plato famously expresses such concerns in Ion, for example... (shrink)