This paper critically examines three unresolved or problematic aspects of the current scholarly consensus on al-Fārābī’s conception of the poetic syllogism. The consensus, as articulated in key articles by Schoeler and Hodges & Druart, builds on earlier work by Aouad & Schoeler, and we will consider three main aspects of it: (1) the structure of the poetic syllogism and the interpretation of al-Fārābī’s examples given in the _Discourse on Proportion and Composition_ (_Qawl fī l-tanāsub wa-l-ta’līf_), (2) the dismissal of certain (...) passages as irrelevant to understanding his conception, in particular a passage of the _Treatise on the Canons of the Art of the Poets_ (_Maqāla fī qawānīn ṣinā’at al-shu’arā’_), and (3) the relationship between the _Discourse_ and other texts on poetry written by al-Fārābī. While these contributions have significantly advanced the field, this paper identifies areas where the consensus remains open to debate and calls for further scholarly attention. First, we challenge the assumption that the two examples of the poetic syllogism provided by al-Fārābī in the _Discourse_ are structurally identical. Instead, we argue that they represent two distinct formal variations of the poetic syllogism, suggesting a more nuanced understanding of its structure. Second, we contest Schoeler’s dismissal of a passage from the _Canons_ as irrelevant to al-Fārābī’s conception of the poetic syllogism. Contrary to this view, we propose that this passage may be closely related to the second example of the poetic syllogism in the _Discourse_. This connection, if substantiated, could provide new insights into al-Fārābī’s conception of the poetic syllogism and its relation with other texts written by him. Third, we highlight two significant points of divergence between the _Canons_ and the _Discourse_. The first concerns the classification of syllogisms, where the _Canons_ and the _Discourse_ appear to differ in their treatment of poetic discourse. Whereas in the _Canons_ poetic utterances or statements are usually considered to be false, the _Discourse_ says explicitly that whoever says that poetry is false is mistaken. The second point of divergence pertains to al-Fārābī’s identification of “analogy” (_tamthīl_) as the poetic syllogism par excellence in the _Canons_.This form of syllogism does not align with the structure exemplified in the _Discourse_, raising questions about the Discourse’s attribution to al-Fārābī. While this paper does not propose definitive solutions to these issues, it underscores their importance and calls for further research to address these unresolved questions. However, even if this paper does not propose definitive solutions, it offers some guidelines to find some of these solutions. From this perspective, we propose that a fuller account of al-Fārābī’s poetic syllogism must link the examples of the poetic syllogism in the _Discourse_, al-Fārābī’s so-called ‘procedure’ in the _Canons_, and the syllogistic structure of analogy. Some links between these elements are hinted at in the present paper, such as the relationship between analogy and the _Discourse_, and the relationship between the ‘procedure’ in the _Canons_ and the _Discourse_. Further research should be undertaken to prove or disprove these relations, or make explicit new ones, so that we could have a better understanding of the poetic syllogism. By critically engaging with the existing consensus, this study aims to stimulate a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of al-Fārābī’s poetic syllogism. (shrink)

A long tradition of research including classical rhetoric, esthetics and poetics theory, formalism and structuralism, as well as current perspectives in (neuro)cognitive poetics has investigated structural and functional aspects of literature reception. Despite a wealth of literature published in specialized journals like Poetics, however, still little is known about how the brain processes and creates literary and poetic texts. Still, such stimulus material might be suited better than other genres for demonstrating the complexities with which our brain (...) constructs the world in and around us, because it unifies thought and language, music and imagery in a clear, manageable way, most often with play, pleasure, and emotion (Schrott and Jacobs, 2011 ). In this paper, I discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literary reading together with pertinent results from studies on poetics, text processing, emotion, or neuroaesthetics, and outline current challenges and future perspectives. (shrink)

Poems are not the only things we sometimes call poetic. We experience as poetic also prose passages, as well as films, music, visual art, and even occurrences in daily life. But what is it exactly for something to be poetic in this wider sense? Discussion of the poetic in this sense is virtually nonexistent in the extant analytic literature. The aim of this article is to get a start on trying to come to grips with this phenomenon—the poetic as an (...) aesthetic category that outruns poetry as an art form. It proposes an initial sketch of an account in terms of the fittingness of certain affective reactions to artworks and other things, reactions featuring notably elements of tenderness and elevation. (shrink)

In Poetics of Reverie he considers the absolute origins of that imagery: language, sexuality, childhood, the Cartesian ego, and the universe.

A founding text of European aestheticism and literary criticism, Poetics underpins our moden understanding of imaginative writing. Anthony Kenny's new translation is accompanied by associated material from Plato, Sir Philip Sidney, P. B. Shelley, and Dorothy L. Sayers and a wide-ranging introduction.

The philosopher René Descartes is usually associated with cold reason rather than with feeling, to the extent that Rousseau charged his philosophy had "slashed poetry's throat." Andrea Gadberry argues, on the contrary, that Descartes' thought was crucially enabled by early modern poetry and rhetoric. Where others have seen Cartesian philosophy as a triumph of disembodied reason, Gadberry points to Descartes's own impassioned and poetic negotiations with the difficulties of thought and its limits. Gadberry's approach to seventeenth-century writings poses questions urgent (...) for the twenty-first: What is thinking? What does it feel like? What is it good for? Her book reveals an implicit poetics in Descartes' texts, from the puzzling forms of riddle, emblem, and anagram to the antecedents of more familiar, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry in love lyric and elegy. Gadberry's argument is grounded in the rich poetic culture of Descartes' time, even as it traces a biography of thinking. Helping us read classic moments of philosophical argumentation in a new light, this elegant study also expands outward to redefine thinking in light of its poetic shape. This book will be the first volume published in the new Thinking Literature series edited by Nan Z. Da and Anahid Nersessian. (shrink)

Combining literary and philosophical analysis, this study defends an utterly innovative reading of the early history of poetics. It is the first to argue that there is a distinctively Socratic view of poetry and the first to connect the Socratic view of poetry with earlier literary tradition.Literary theory is usually said to begin with Plato's famous critique of poetry in the Republic. Grace Ledbetter challenges this entrenched assumption by arguing that Plato's earlier dialogues Ion, Protagoras, and Apology introduce a (...) distinctively Socratic theory of poetry that responds polemically to traditional poets as rival theorists. Ledbetter tracks the sources of this Socratic response by introducing separate readings of the poetics implicit in the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar. Examining these poets' theories from a new angle that uncovers their literary, rhetorical, and political aims, she demonstrates their decisive influence on Socratic thinking about poetry.The Socratic poetics Ledbetter elucidates focuses not on censorship, but on the interpretation of poetry as a source of moral wisdom. This philosophical approach to interpreting poetry stands at odds with the poets' own theories--and with the Sophists' treatment of poetry. Unlike the Republic's focus on exposing and banishing poetry's irrational and unavoidably corrupting influence, Socrates' theory includes poetry as subject matter for philosophical inquiry within an examined life.Reaching back into what has too long been considered literary theory's prehistory, Ledbetter advances arguments that will redefine how classicists, philosophers, and literary theorists think about Plato's poetics. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to explore the question, “What distinguishes philosophy in its original sense? ” My intent is not to provide a historical overview of philosophy, but to concentrate on what makes philosophy a liberating practice. I argue that this practice is rooted in its poetic and affirmative way of organizing life. To emphasize this idea, I contrast it with the presumed organization found in social media and networks. While social media and networks encourages commitment by simplifying complexity, (...) they also restrict users' freedom, responsibility, and ability to make meaningful decisions. To support these claims, I examine the role of algorithms in the organizing function of social media and networks, viewing them through the lens of a poetic philosophy to determine if a more affirmative and liberating forms of existential organization is possible. (shrink)

At least since Aristotle, phronesis (practical wisdom) and poetics (making or creating) have been understood as essentially different activities, one moral the other (in itself) non-moral. Today, if anything, this distinction is sharpened by a Romantic association of poetics with inner subjective expression. Recent revivals of Aristotelian ethics sometimes allow for poetic dimensions of ethics, but these are still separated from practical wisdom per se. Through a fresh reading of phronesis in the French hermeneutical phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur, I (...) argue that phronesis should be viewed as at least in part poetic at its very core. That is, phronesis deals with the fundamentally tragic human situation of moral incommensurability, and it responds to this by making or creating new moral meaning. Such a poetics of practical wisdom helps phronesis stand up to significant and important critiques made of it by a range of modernists and post-modernists, pointing a way forward for some important contemporary moral debates. (shrink)

Drawing on Spinoza’s insights and responding to James’s analysis, I argue that the possibility of a more equal and productive partnership between poetry and philosophy may only be realizable when the resources of each are brought to bear on a common problem external to both. I support this contention by considering how, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future, philosophical reasoning about the causes of the current climate crisis is combined with the poetic imagination of (...) a possible climate future for the purposes of motivating readers to put their understanding of what it is rational to do into practice. Finally, I suggest that the formal flexibility of the literary genre grants it a certain privilege over philosophical modes of communication insofar as it allows it to stage the relation between the poetic and the philosophical within its own boundaries. (shrink)

_Plant Poetics: Literary Forms and Functions of the Vegetal_ traces plants across literary texts from ancient epics to modern poetry. Contextualizing current trends in plant studies, this volume shows how vegetal beings shape our literary and cultural expressions.

Caretaker-infant attachment is a complex but well-recognized adaptation in humans. An early instance of (or precursor to) attachment behavior is the dyadic interaction between adults and infants of 6 to 24 weeks, commonly called "babytalk." Detailed analysis of 1 minute of spontaneous babytalk with an 8-week infant shows that the poetic texture of the mother’s speech—specifically its use of metrics, phonetics, and foregrounding—helps to shape and direct the baby’s attention, as it also coordinates the partners’ emotional communication. We hypothesize that (...) the ability to respond to poetic features of language is present as early as the first few weeks of life and that this ability attunes cognitive and affective capacities in ways that provide a foundation for the skills at work in later aesthetic production and response. By linking developmental social processes with formal cognitive aspects of art, we challenge predominant views in evolutionary psychology that literary art is a superfluous byproduct of adaptive evolutionary mechanisms or primarily an ornament created by sexual selection. (shrink)

In Poetics of Deconstruction, Lynn Turner develops an intimate attention to independent films, art, and the psychoanalyses by which they might make sense other than under continued license of the subject that calls himself man. Drawing extensively from Jacques Derrida's philosophy in precise dialogue with feminist thought, animal studies and posthumanism (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe) this book explores the vulnerability of the living as rooted in non-oppositional differences. From abjection to mourning, to the speculative and (...) the performative, it reposes concepts and buzzwords seemingly at home in feminist theory, visual culture and the humanities more broadly. Stepping away from the carno-phallogocentric legacies of the signifier and the dialectic, Poetics of Deconstruction asks you to welcome nonpower into politics, always sexual but no longer anchored in sacrifice. (shrink)

What is Imagination? What is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in a contemporary civilization dominated by the image? How can we reconcile the right to imagine with the right to justice? Are the claims of artistic creativity and moral responsibility compatible? With an extended foreword and an afterword chapter, and fascinating new material on the narrative imagination, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern provides a critically developed and accessible account of the major theories of imagination in modern European (...) thought. It analyses and assesses the decisive contributions made to our understanding of the imaginary life by phenomenology (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard), hermeneutics (Heidegger, Ricoeur), and post-modernism (Vattima, Kristeva, Lyotard). Richard Kearney achieves this with a coherent and committed approach, which displays his own passionate concern for the claims of imagination in our post-modern world of fragmentation and fracture. This is essential reading for those interested in current leading debates on the role of imagining in continental philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, art theory and literary criticism. (shrink)

Poetic Interaction presents an original approach to the history of philosophy in order to elaborate a fresh theory that accounts for the place freedom in the Western philosophical tradition. In his thorough analysis of the aesthetic theories of Hegel, Heidegger, and Kant, John McCumber shows that the interactionist perspective recently put forth by Jürgen Habermas was in fact already present in some form in the German Enlightenment and in Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology. McCumber's historical placement of the interactionist perspective runs counter (...) to both Habermas's own views and to those of scholars who would locate the origin of these developments in American pragmatism. From the metaphysical approaches of Plato and Aristotle to the interactionist approaches of Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer, McCumber provides an original narrative of the history of philosophy that focuses on the ways that each thinker has formulated the relationships between language, truth, and freedom. Finally, McCumber presents his critical demarcation of various forms of freedom to reveal that the interactionist approach has to be expanded and enlarged to include all that is understood by "poetic interaction." For McCumber, freedom is inherently pluralistic. Poetic Interaction will be invaluable to political philosophers, historians of philosophy, philosophers of language, and scholars of legal criticism. (shrink)

Prologue: learning to read -- Reading Plato -- Poetry: the measure of truth -- A life without poetry -- The power of persuasion -- Eros: the work of desire -- Dialectics: making sense of logos -- Epilogue: poetic justice.

Social poetics as research and practice: living in and learning from the process of research This paper is both a report of research work carried out by one author of the paper with the other involved in a supervisory role, and a reflection on methodology that was an emergent property of the research process. The research question arose when professional preunderstandings about schizophrenia as a biological disturbance were bracketed as a Husserlian form of phenomenology was adopted. The initial study (...) focused on the meanings three individuals attached to being diagnosed with a mental illness and being involved in psychiatric treatment systems. The exploration of meanings led to the researcher being guided by one study participant in relation to a suitable framework for making sense of her lived experience of being entangled in psychiatric systems. This involved an appreciation of the poetics of interpersonal interaction that was simultaneously fuelled by the researcher’s reading of social poetics in psychology. Thus, the research became a hermeneutic inquiry, focused upon the text of one participant (Beth)1 and the psychiatric system that she and colleagues encountered. Beth’s psychiatric predicament was described by a loss of ‘self’, psychiatric interrogation, and positive and negative features of immersion in the system. A byproduct of taking a poetic approach was that the participant found the research process therapeutic. Thus, social poetics encouraged a beneficial blurring of the boundaries between research and practice. In both arenas, social poetics can lead to a different level of understanding. This is contradictory to mainstream approaches to research that value objectivity with a strict division between the researcher and the subjects, with the aim of producing scientific knowledge. (shrink)

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turningpoint in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. FernandHallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science orastronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. Thesenew representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of"genius" or "intuition."Instead, Hallyn investigates the problem of how (...) new scientific hypothesesare actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected tosupport a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentallydifferent from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must beexamined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to beinseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of bothneoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Departmentof French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

The entering of poetics into the field of anthropology, intimated by Nietzsche, introduced by Bachelard and Bataille and continued in the framework of poststructuralism has influenced the scope and the models of knowledge traditionally related to anthropology, by reexamining and changing them. This influence is researched through the analysis of several authors, discussing the political aspects of their writings at the same time. Their notions of polarity, discontinuity, suspension, transgression and dissemination make visible possible directions of transformation of anthropology. (...) Uvodjenje poetike u polje antropologije, koje se najavljuje kod Nietzschea, a ostvaruje kroz radove Bachelarda i Bataillea i nastavlja unutar post-strukturalizma, vodilo je preispitivanju granica te discipline, kao i primerenosti samih modela znanja koji se unutar nje podrazumevaju i na kojima je konstituisana. U tekstu je kroz pristupe vise autora pokazano kako se moze uspostaviti ili porusiti most izmedju racionalnog i iracionalnog u antropologiji i sa kakvim teorijskim i politickim implikacijama. (shrink)

Introduction: Aristotle's phantasia and the ancient concept of imagination -- Visualization, vividness (enargeia) and realism -- Mathematical projection, copying and analogy -- Prophecy, inspiration and allegory -- Conclusion: ancient and modern imagination.

Despite its common use in both literature and popular discourse, the concept of “poetic justice” in which a wrong-doer is harmed by his own crimes has been completely ignored by both literary and philosophical scholars. We can learn more about it by comparing its charms to those of its more popular cousin, revenge. Each can assuage our resentment at the wrong-doer’s contempt of human suffering, promises to teach a moral lesson, and can borrow some moral justification from the golden rule. (...) Their satisfactions are often deceptive, but it behooves us to understand the attractions of each. (shrink)

Hackles have been raised in biosemiotic circles by T. L. Short’s assertion that semiosis, as defined by Peirce, entails “acting for purposes” and therefore is not found below the level of the organism (2007a:174–177). This paper examines Short’s teleology and theory of purposeful behavior and offers a remedy to the disagreement. Remediation becomes possible when the issue is reframed in the terms of the complexity sciences, which allows intentionality to be understood as the interplay between local and global aspects of (...) a system within a system. What is called “acting for purposes” is not itself a type of behavior so much as a relationship between a dynamic system that “exists for a purpose” and its microprocesses that “serve purposes.” The “intentional object” of philosophy is recast here as the holistic self-organized dynamics of a system, which exists for the purpose of self-maintenance, and that constrains the parts’ behaviors, which serve the purpose of forming the system. (A “system” can be any emergent, e.g. an abiotic form, an adapted species, a self, a conditioned response, thought, or a set of ideas.) The self-organized whole, which is represented to the parts in their own constrained behaviors, assumes the guiding function so long attributed to the mysterious “intentional object.” If emergent self-causation is not disallowed, creative originality, as well as directionality, becomes part of the definition of purposeful behavior. Thus, key tools used here, required for understanding emergence, come from poetics rather than semoitics. In the microprocesses of self-organization, I find what I call “accidental” indices and icons — which are poetic in the sense that they involve mere metonymic contiguity and metaphoric similarity — and which are preferentially selected under constrained conditions allowing radically new connections to habituate into an “intentional” self-organized system that, not coincidentally, has some of the emergent characteristics of a conventional symbolic system. (shrink)

In _The Poetics of Political Thinking_ Davide Panagia focuses on the role that aesthetic sensibilities play in theorists’ evaluations of political arguments. Examining works by thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Jacques Rancière, Panagia shows how each one invokes aesthetic concepts and devices, such as metaphor, mimesis, imagination, beauty, and the sublime. He argues that it is important to recognize and acknowledge these poetic forms of representation because they provide evaluative standards that theorists use in appraising the value of ideas—ideas (...) about justice, politics, and democratic life. An investigation into the intertwined histories of aesthetic and political accounts of representation—such as Panagia presents here—sheds light on how modes of poetic thinking delimit the questions of unity and diversity that continue to animate contemporary political theory. Panagia not only illuminates the structure of much contemporary political theory but also shows why understanding the poetics of political thinking is vital to contemporary society. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s critique of negation and his privileging of paradox as the source of political thought, Panagia suggests that a non-teleological concept of difference might generate insight into pressing questions about foreignness and citizenship. Turning to the liberal/poststructural debate that dominates contemporary political theory, he compares John Rawls’s concept of justice to Rancière’s ideas about political disagreement in order to demonstrate how, despite their differences, both thinkers comprehend aesthetic and moral reasoning as part and parcel of political writing. Considering the writings of William Hazlitt and Jürgen Habermas, he describes how the essay has become the exemplary genre of what is considered rational political argument. _The Poetics of Political Thinking_ is a compelling reappraisal of the role of representation within political thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Departing from the hegemonic position of epidemiology in population physical activity research and policy, I argue for the significance of a complementary, holistic approach: human movement ecology. The argument is developed in two steps. In a first step, and using perspectives from body ecology and eco-philosophy, I emphasize the potential in movement of a ’dynamic and spontaneous ecologization’, which opens for the development of ecological consciousness and sustainable practice. In a second step, I test HME towards a ’hard case’: (...) everyday routine walking in urban settings. Even here, and paying particular attention to the nature of habitual movement and the need for a ’greening’ of urban environments, I point to a significant movement ecological potential. I conclude that HME provides a fertile and complementary conceptual alternative to PA epidemiology. The challenge of low population PA levels is probably best met with facilitating for movement as an integral part of a sustainable everyday life. Actually, with an increased realization of HME ideals in practice, instrumental PA policies would become less relevant and, on a longer-term basis, perhaps not needed at all. (shrink)

This paper intends to study the poetics of water in various 16th and 17th utopias or imaginary tales: Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) and François Rabelais’s Gargantua (1534), Pantagruel (1532) and Quart Livre (1552). Based on Gaston Bachelard and Gilbert Durand’s research, the analysis intends to highlight the function of the aquatic element in the writing of fantastic tales inspired notably by Lucian (A True Story). Water being the infinitely malleable substance, endowed with plural metaphors (...) and in turn positively and negatively valued, it plays multiple roles in poetic imagination, which this analysis attempts to determine. (shrink)

Insights generated in the emerging field of evolutionary psychology offer a useful new framework for examining Edith Wharton's “Xingu.” The satiric wit energizing this well-known short story depends in large measure upon the obtuseness of its central characters, who embrace counterfactual estimations of their gifts and attainments: thwarting the operations of poetic justice in order to protect social reputation and self-image, they become objects of derision. Their behavior illustrates the workings of adaptive mechanisms for self-deception. Insofar as their comically exaggerated (...) commitment to false self-presentation illustrates universal features of evolved human nature, the target of Wharton's scorn is accordingly enlarged. Her narrative spotlights the psychological processes that sustain self-deception and scapegoating, raising serious questions concerning human claims to rational thought and ethical principle. (shrink)

When J.R. Cash (Johnny Cash) sings that he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, audiences impressed by the singer's skillful creation and depiction of a nihilistic lyrical subject clap and cheer. When Terrell Doyley (Skengdo) and Joshua Malinga (A.M.) sang broadly similar lyrics at a concert in 2018, London's Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service took them to be describing violent acts they had participated in and violent intentions they harbored, and the lyrics were used (...) as the basis for legal proceedings against the singers that resulted in convictions. In this paper, I will argue that Doyley and Malinga's case illustrates a distinctive and important form that epistemic injustice can take. By failing to see their lyrics as speech that involves the exercise of their capacity for imagination, the police and prosecutors treat them as an impoverished sort of epistemic agent. I will call the wrong involved in cases like this one poetic injustice. (shrink)

This paper reflects on affect and emotion as they relate to poetics — her/histories — in twenty-first century museums. Using specific examples, it considers the ways in which collections of material culture hold diverse meanings and how ideas are communicated to audiences over time and space but might also be challenged through imaginative activity. Key objects, exhibitions and activities discussed highlight masculinities at work in museums and include the temporary art installations by Yinka Shonibare and Fred Wilson in the (...) Victoria and Albert Museum's (V&A) Norfolk House Music Room in 2007; the portrait in oils of the Jamaican scholar Francis Williams, painted by an anonymous artist around 1745; and a contemporary oral commentary by Benjamin Zephaniah in the V&A British Galleries, which are considered through a feminist lens of poetics. (shrink)

"A close analysis of the Republic's diverse literary styles shows how the peculiarities of verbal texture in Platonic discourse can be explained by Plato's remolding of tropes and techniques from poetry and the Presocratics. This book argues that Plato smuggles poetic language into the Republic's prose in order to characterize the deceitful coloration and polymorphy that accompanies the world of Becoming as opposed to the Real. Plato's distinctive discourse thus can transmit, even to those figures focused on the visual within (...) his Republic, the shiftiness of the base and the unjust."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt at developing a poetic ontology of the senses through an understanding of poetry, or more importantly the poetic as such, i.e., the movement, temporality, and various antinomies within poetic gesturing which interrupt the logic of closed meaning and totalization. Through a range of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, amongst others, and primarily the poetry of Pessoa and Rilke, the paper investigates how poetry (poetics) may not only show us a path (...) toward a poetic ontology (thus an ontology in correlation with the senses and movements of natural and material existence), but furthermore point us toward the possibility of an ethical becoming which mirrors the movements of poetry, in contrast to following the rigid structures of absolute and fixed meaning. The overall intention in this analysis is not to find a clear, complete, or overarching thought which may point us toward the ethical or the good. The attempt here is to show that ethics is an activity, a continuous becoming (analogous to poetics) that can be sensed through a way of being in the world, and "being-with" the world, as compared to simply understood through cognitive forms of abstract knowledge. (shrink)

Elkins provides an abundantly illustrated history of the theory and practice of perspective. Looking at key texts from the Renaissance to the present, he traces a fundamental historical change that took place in the way in which perspective was conceptualized; first a technique for constructing pictures, it slowly became a metaphor for subjectivity.

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)

This important new editio maior of Aristotle's Poetics is based on all the primary sources and is accompanied by a details critical apparatus. The introductory chapters provide important new insights about the transmission of the text to the present day and especially the significance of the Syro-Arabic tradition.

Speaking is a highly conventional enterprise. But unusual usages are, nonetheless, frequently encountered. Some of these novelties fall flat, while others find favour, to the extent of entering common usage. He considered to say something will sound wrong to most native speakers, while The military disappeared her husband, which was more or less unsayable prior to the 1960s, has come to seem fine. Linguist Adelle E. Goldberg has recently argued that speakers display a remarkable openness to new words, phrases and (...) even grammatical forms, when there is no current way of communicating whatever it is those novel strings serve to express. My paper exegetes Goldberg’s findings to illuminate the question of poetic judgement. It proposes that there is a strong parallel between how people judge linguistic innovation in everyday speaking, and the way poets and critics judge innovative poetic diction: in both cases there is a premium on what cannot otherwise be said. The paper proceeds to deepen the analogies between these two modes of judgement. It starts by linking the lack of rules for determining the acceptability of new words and phrases in everyday speaking with the indifference to prior rules associated with aesthetic judgement in Kant’s third critique, and apparent in the appraisals of many a contemporary poetry critic. It turns to consider the claim that what motivates the judgements under consideration is a preference in the human conceptual system for distinct symbols to have mutually exclusive meanings. A fourth section concerns what Construction Grammar, the broad field of Goldberg’s intervention, has to reveal about the conditions under which new words and phrases can take on meaning in the first place. This too has something to suggest about why we judge certain poetic efforts poor, others landed. (shrink)

This article draws on the interrelated concepts of reverie and repose in Gaston Bachelard's philosophy to approach Claire Denis' poetic foregrounding of objects in 35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums, 2008). Connecting Bachelard's work on time to his later studies of the imagination, I demonstrate how the poetic time of reverie and repose are essential to Bachelard's thinking. Focusing on three especially charged objects (trains, rice cookers and lanterns), I argue for reverie and repose as being embedded into the rhythmic (...) structure, affective organisation and form of Denis' film. Contextualising Bachelard's later thinking in relation to Eugène Minkowski, I maintain that Denis' objects reverberate (both formally and sensuously). In 35 Shots of Rum, Denis' poetic objects and her evocation of different in-between states parallels Bachelard's own materialist thinking on the imagination, reverie and repose. (shrink)

Heidegger repeatedly performs the encounter of thinking and poetry, explicitly for the sake of inaugurating a non-metaphysical way of thinking. This transformed thinking is to be poetic and non-conceptual, eschewing the comfort of transparent meaning, the grasping power of concepts, the presentational force of images, or the self-evident correctness of propositional statements. The need for such a non-metaphysical thinking arises historically, at the endpoint of the epoch of the completion of metaphysics, when it comes to roost in the Gestell, the (...) technological essencing of being, which pervades and powers all that is in being: all beings, entities and occurrences. Poetic thinking responds to the modern drive to maximum availablity and dispose-ability of being and beings, freeing up the possibility of a path alternative to the dominion of calculative thought and its technological metrics. (shrink)

A collection of ten previously published or delivered essays by Taminiaux (philosophy, Boston College and the Universite de Louvain).

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the experience of a poem qua poem is an experience of poetic thickness , i.e. an experience in which poetic form and poetic content are inseparable. I present a critical analysis of A. C. Bradley’s ‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake’ lecture in Section 1, indicating both the strengths and weaknesses of his conception of resonant meaning. Section 2 draws on subsequent work by I. A. Richards and Peter Lamarque to advance my account (...) of the relationship in question, poetic thickness, understood as a demand made of a poem rather than a property discovered therein. In Sections 3–6 I discuss four objections to form-content unity from Peter Kivy: perfect circularity, ubiquitous unity, the sugar-coated pill tradition, and the defence from tradition. I show that all these objections fail against poetic thickness. I conclude that the experience of a poem qua poem is indeed an experience of thickness, and that poetic thickness is therefore a necessary condition of poetry. (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship between infrastructure and attention through the lens of contemporary Danish poetry. It applies Susan Leigh Star’s concept of “infrastructural inversion” on the poetic practices of two Danish poets with immigrant background, Yahya Hassan and Shadi Angelina Bazeghi, by focusing on the infrastructural conditions for the production, circulation and reception of their poetry via literary institutions and liberal news media in Denmark in recent years.

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)

This essay studies some of the poetic devices employed by Osundare to project social commitment and vision in Songs of the Marketplace. It examines how the poet’s deployment of style makes his poetry more accessible to a larger audience than that of his predecessors. Like the oral traditional performance, his poetry employs rich Yoruba oral literary devices in a way that is unique and glaringly innovative. Osundare’s radical poetic style has a clearly defined concept and role. It is also central (...) to the resolution of the polemics of governance and politics in society. The pervasive theme of the collections remains a serious concern for hope out of the decadent situation that has eaten deep into the fabric of our social existence. (shrink)

One of the central features of Western existence is the objectification and use of other beings in creating the subjectification of human beings. My argument is for a Christian veganism that rejects the dependence of the subject on the object status of other beings. The roadblocks to recognizing the necessity for Christian veganism I call the pedagogy of the oppressor. I propose that one way to change the subject-object relationship is a poetics of Christian engagement. Christian veganism may seem (...) a radical position theoretically and pragmatically, but I will offer suggestions for expanding Christian engagement with other animals and for the food and environmental justice movements of which veganism is a part. (shrink)