Download or read book Philosophy as Poetry written by Richard Rorty and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2016-12-07 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undeniably iconoclastic, and doggedly practical where others were abstract, the late Richard Rorty was described by some as a philosopher with no philosophy. Rorty was skeptical of systems claiming to have answers, seeing scientific and aesthetic schools as vocabularies rather than as indispensable paths to truth. But his work displays a profound awareness of philosophical tradition and an urgent concern for how we create a society. As Michael Bérubé writes in his introduction to this new volume, Rorty looked upon philosophy as "a creative enterprise of dreaming up new and more humane ways to live." Drawn from Rorty’s acclaimed 2004 Page-Barbour lectures, Philosophy as Poetry distills many of the central ideas in his work. Rorty begins by addressing poetry and philosophy, which are often seen as contradictory pursuits. He offers a view of philosophy as a poem, beginning with the ancient Greeks and rewritten by succeeding generations of philosophers seeking to improve it. He goes on to examine analytic philosophy and the rejection by some philosophers, notably Wittgenstein, of the notion of philosophical problems that have solutions. The book concludes with an invigorating suspension of intellectual borders as Rorty focuses on the romantic tradition and relates it to philosophic thought. This book makes an ideal starting place for anyone looking for an introduction to Rorty’s thought and his contribution to our sense of an American pragmatism, as well as an understanding of his influence and the controversy that attended his work. Page-Barbour Lectures
Download or read book The Philosophy of Poetry written by John Gibson and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years philosophers have produced important books on nearly all the major arts: the novel and painting, music and theatre, dance and architecture, conceptual art and even gardening. Poetry is the sole exception. This is an astonishing omission, one this collection of original essays will correct. If contemporary philosophy still regards metaphors such as 'Juliet is the sun' as a serious problem, one has an acute sense of how prepared it is to make philosophical and aesthetic sense of poems such W. B. Yeats's 'The Second Coming', Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy', or Paul Celan's 'Todesfuge'. The Philosophy of Poetry brings together philosophers of art, language, and mind to expose and address the array of problems poetry raises for philosophy. In doing so it lays the foundation for a proper philosophy of poetry, setting out the various puzzles and paradoxes that future work in the field will have to address. Given its breadth of approach, the volume is relevant not only to aesthetics but to all areas of philosophy concerned with meaning, truth, and the communicative and expressive powers of language more generally. Poetry is the last unexplored frontier in contemporary analytic aesthetics, and this volume offers a powerful demonstration of how central poetry should be to philosophy.
Download or read book Philosophy and Poetry written by Ranjan Ghosh and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since Plato’s Socrates exiled the poets from the ideal city in The Republic, Western thought has insisted on a strict demarcation between philosophy and poetry. Yet might their long-standing quarrel hide deeper affinities? This book explores the distinctive ways in which twentieth-century and contemporary continental thinkers have engaged with poetry and its contribution to philosophical meaning making, challenging us to rethink how philosophy has been changed through its encounters with poetry. In wide-ranging reflections on thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Irigaray, Badiou, Kristeva, and Agamben, among others, distinguished contributors consider how different philosophers encountered the force and intensity of poetry and the negotiations that took place as they sought resolutions of the quarrel. Instead of a clash between competing worldviews, they figured the relationship between philosophy and poetry as one of productive mutuality, leading toward new modes of thinking and understanding. Spanning a range of issues with nuance and rigor, this compelling and comprehensive book opens new possibilities for philosophical poetry and the poetics of philosophy.
Download or read book The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry written by Raymond Barfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-31 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its beginnings, philosophy's language, concepts and imaginative growth have been heavily influenced by poetry and poets. Drawing on the work of a wide range of thinkers throughout the history of Western philosophy, Raymond Barfield explores the pervasiveness of poetry's impact on philosophy and, conversely, how philosophy has sometimes resisted or denied poetry's influence. Although some thinkers, like Giambatista Vico and Nietzsche, praised the wisdom of poets, and saw poetry and philosophy as mutually beneficial pursuits, others resented, diminished or eliminated the importance of poetry in philosophy. Beginning with the famous passage in Plato's Republic in which Socrates exiles the poets from the city, this book traces the history of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry through the works of thinkers in the Western tradition ranging from Plato to the work of the contemporary thinker Mikhail Bakhtin.
Download or read book Falling Water written by John Koethe and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As a poet who is a teacher of philosophy, John Koethe knows better than most of us the uses and dissatisfactions of both disciplines, if indeed they are disciplines. In this ravishing and haunted book he comes face to face with the time when 'more than half my life is gone,' and must try to find the meaning of 'a childish/dream of love, and then the loss of love,/and all the intricate years between.' As funny and fresh as it is tragic and undeceived, Falling Water ranks with Wallace Stevens' Auroras of Autumn as one of the profoundest meditations on existence ever formulated by an American Poet." --John Ashbery "To describe with unpromising candor the inner life of a man adrift in the waning of the 20th century is one thing, but to do it without a shred of self-pity is another. The poems of his new book, Falling Water, are like no one else's. In them, even the most extreme exertions of consciousness are transformed into the luminous measures of beautiful speech." --Mark Strand "In this ambitious volume, the magnificent poet who gave us The Late Wisconsin Spring moves ever more swiftly and surefootedly into the deepest regions of self-invention: the past -- few poets write more accurately and painfully about that uncanny estranged place that never finds its way out of us; the present, or idea of the present, as mere projection, and yet a projection so poignantly, materially, tenderly touched it gleams with all its claustrophobic distances; and the future...'I wish that time could bring the future back again/And let me see things as they used to seem to me/Before I found myself alone, in an emancipated state--/Alone and free and filled...' With its low-key blank verse, its apparently casual manner of speech, its digressions, asides, recollections -- with all its taking its time -- this is a poetry of magnificent undertow, all proximity of thought, singularity of contemplation, protest, pretext, reflection -- all disenchantment and then, suddenly, blazing re-enchantment, with the newly, lovingly, seen-through real." --Jorie Graham
Download or read book Reading Philosophy Writing Poetry written by Wendy Swartz and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a formative period of Chinese culture, early medieval writers made extensive use of a diverse set of resources, in which such major philosophical classics as Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Classic of Changes featured prominently. Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry examines how these writers understood and manipulated a shared intellectual lexicon to produce meaning. Focusing on works by some of the most important and innovative poets of the period, this book explores intertextuality—the transference, adaptation, or rewriting of signs—as a mode of reading and a condition of writing. It illuminates how a text can be seen in its full range of signifying potential within the early medieval constellation of textual connections and cultural signs.If culture is that which connects its members past, present, and future, then the past becomes an inherited and continually replenished repository of cultural patterns and signs with which the literati maintains an organic and constantly negotiated relationship of give and take. Wendy Swartz explores how early medieval writers in China developed a distinctive mosaic of ways to participate in their cultural heritage by weaving textual strands from a shared and expanding store of literary resources into new patterns and configurations."
Download or read book Things Merely Are written by Simon Critchley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-02-18 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an invitation to read poetry. Simon Critchley argues that poetry enlarges life with a range of observation, power of expression and attention to language that eclipses any other medium. In a rich engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Critchley reveals that poetry also contains deep and important philosophical insight. Above all, he agues for a 'poetic epistemology' that enables us to think afresh the philosophical problem of the relation between mind and world, and ultimately to cast the problem away. Drawing astutely on Kant, the German and English Romantics and Heidegger, Critchley argues that through its descriptions of particular things and their stubborn plainness - whether water, guitars, trees, or cats - poetry evokes the 'mereness' of things. It is this experience, he shows, that provokes the mood of calm and releases the imaginative insight we need to press back against the pressure of reality. Critchley also argues that this calm defines the cinematic eye of Terrence Malick, whose work is discussed at the end of the book.
Download or read book Philosophers and Their Poets written by Charles Bambach and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the role that poets and the poetic word play in the formation of philosophical thinking in the modern German tradition. Several of the most celebrated philosophers in the German tradition since Kant afford to poetry an all-but-unprecedented status in Western thought. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer argue that the scope, limits, and possibilities of philosophy are intimately intertwined with those of poetry. For them, poetic thinking itself is understood as intrinsic to the kind of thinking that defines philosophical inquiry and the philosophical life, and they developed their views through extensive and sustained considerations of specific poets, as well as specific poetic figures and images. This book offers essays by leading scholars that address each of the major figures of this tradition and the respective poets they engage, including Schiller, Archilochus, Pindar, Hölderlin, Eliot, and Celan, while also discussing the poets’ contemporary relevance to philosophy in the continental tradition. Above all, the book explores an approach to language that rethinks its role as a mere tool for communication or for the dissemination of knowledge. Here language will be understood as an essential event that opens up the world in a primordial sense whereby poetry comes to have a deeply ethical significance for human beings. In this way, the volume positions ethics at the center of continental discourse, even as it engages philosophy itself as a discourse about language attuned to the rigor of what poetry ultimately expresses. “With its impressive range of both philosophers and poets, this volume opens up new avenues of thinking at the intersections of philosophy and poetry.” — Robert D. Metcalf, cotranslator of Martin Heidegger’s Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy
Download or read book North Point North written by John Koethe and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Point North: New and Selected Poems showcases the work of an important contemporary American poet, winner of the prestigious Kingsley-Tufts Award for Poetry. The volume opens with twenty-one new poems, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, the New Republic, the Paris Review, and the Kenyon Review, among other periodicals, and in The Best American Poems 2001, edited by Robert Hass and David Lehman. Following are selections from Koethe's five earlier collections of poems: Blue Vents, Domes, The Late Wisconsin Spring, The Constructor, and Falling Water. Together these poems create a remarkable and powerful new volume, a milestone in this gifted poet's career.
Download or read book Aristotle s Poetics written by Michael Davis and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wittgenstein s Artillery written by James C. Klagge and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Wittgenstein sought a more effective way of reaching his audience by a poetic style of doing philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, "Really one should write philosophy only as one writes poetry." In Wittgenstein's Artillery, James Klagge shows how, in search of ways to reach his audience, Wittgenstein tried a more poetic style of doing philosophy. Klagge argues that, deploying this new philosophical "artillery"--Klagge's term for Wittgenstein's methods of influencing his readers and students--Wittgenstein moved from an esoteric mode to an evangelical mode, aiming for an effect on his audience that was noncognitive, appealing to the temperament in addition to the intellect. Wittgenstein was an artillery spotter--directing artillery fire to targets--in the Austrian army during World War I, and Klagge argues that, years later, he became a philosophical spotter, struggling to find the right artillery to accomplish his philosophical purpose. Klagge shows how Wittgenstein's work with his students influenced his style of writing philosophy and motivated him to care about the effect of his ideas on his audience. To illustrate Wittgenstein's evolving approach, Klagge draws on not only Wittgenstein's best-known works but also such lesser-known material as notebooks, dictations, lectures, and recollections of students. Klagge then goes beyond Wittgenstein to present a range of literature--biblical parables and children's stories, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche--as other examples of the poetic approach. He concludes by offering his own attempts at a poetic approach to addressing philosophical issues.
Download or read book Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan written by Toru Dutt and published by Graphic Arts Books. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882) is a collection of poems by Toru Dutt. Compiled after her death and published in London, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan is an invaluable work of art from a pioneering figure in Indian history and Bengali literature. Born in Calcutta to a family of Bengali Christians, Toru Dutt was raised at the crossroads of English and Indian cultures. In addition to her native Bengali, she became fluent in English, French, and Sanskrit as a young girl, eventually writing novels and poems in each language. Despite her limited body of work, Dutt’s legacy as a groundbreaking writer remains firm in India and around the world. “Savitri was the only child / Of Madra's wise and mighty king; / Stern warriors, when they saw her, smiled, / As mountains smile to see the spring.” In rhyming English verse, Bengali poet Toru Dutt presents some of the oldest and most sacred stories from ancient India. Translated from Sanskrit into the popular ballad form, Dutt introduces an English audience to the story of Savitri, originally from the epic Mahabharata, as well as the tale of Lakshman, which comes from the Hindu epic Ramayana. Alongside these poems appear Dutt’s versions of Bengali folklore—“Joghadhya Uma”—and poems written during her stay in Europe. “Near Hastings” is a particularly beautiful example of her original verse depicting an otherworldly encounter along the English seacoast: “Near Hastings, on the shingle-beach, / We loitered at the time / When ripens on the wall the peach, / The autumn's lovely prime.” With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Toru Dutt’s Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan is a classic work of Bengali literature reimagined for modern readers.
Download or read book Milton Among the Philosophers written by Stephen M. Fallon and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Johnson charged that Milton "unhappily perplexed his poetry with his philosophy," Stephen M. Fallon argues that the relationship between Milton's philosophy and the poetry of Paradise Lost is a happy one. The author examines Milton's thought in light of the competing philosophical systems that filled the vacuum left by the repudiation of Aristotle in the seventeenth century. In what has become the classic account of Milton's animist materialism, Fallon revises our understanding of Milton's philosophical sophistication. The book offers a new interpretation of the War in Heaven in Paradise Lost as a clash of metaphysical systems, with free will hanging in the balance.
Download or read book Literature Against Philosophy Plato to Derrida written by Mark Edmundson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely book argues that the institutionalisation of literary theory, particularly within American and British academic circles, has led to a sterility of thought which ignores the special character of literary art. Mark Edmundson traces the origins of this tendency to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, in which Plato took the side of philosophy; and he shows how the work of modern theorists - Foucault, Derrida, de Man and Bloom - exhibits similar drives to subsume poetic art into some 'higher' kind of thought. Challenging and controversial, this book should be read by all teachers of literature and of theory, and by anyone concerned about the future of institutionalised literary studies.
Download or read book Poetry and Pragmatism written by Richard Poirier and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Poirier, one of America's most eminent critics, reveals in this book the creative but mostly hidden alliance between American pragmatism and American poetry. He brilliantly traces pragmatism as a philosophical and literary practice grounded in a linguistic skepticism that runs from Emerson and William James to the work of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, and on to the cultural debates of today. More powerfully than ever before, Poirier shows that pragmatism had its start in Emerson, the great example to all his successors of how it is possible to redeem even as you set out to change the literature of the past. Poirier demonstrates that Emerson--and later William James--were essentially philosophers of language, and that it is language that embodies our cultural past, an inheritance to be struggled with, and transformed, before being handed on to future generations. He maintains that in Emersonian pragmatist writing, any loss--personal or cultural--gives way to a quest for what he calls "superfluousness," a kind of rhetorical excess by which powerfully creative individuals try to elude deprivation and stasis. In a wide-ranging meditation on what James called "the vague," Poirier extols the authentic voice of individualism, which, he argues, is tentative and casual rather than aggressive and dogmatic. The concluding chapters describe the possibilities for criticism created by this radically different understanding of reading and writing, which are nothing less than a reinvention of literary tradition itself. Poirier's discovery of this tradition illuminates the work of many of the most important figures in American philosophy and poetry. His reanimation of pragmatism also calls for a redirection of contemporary criticism, so that readers inside as well as outside the academy can begin to respond to poetic language as the source of meaning, not to meaning as the source of language.
Download or read book Words in Blood Like Flowers written by and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did Nietzsche claim to have "written in blood"? Why did Heidegger remain silent after World War II about his participation in the Nazi Party? How did Hölderlin's voice and the voices of other, more ancient poets come to echo in philosophy? Words in Blood, Like Flowers is a classical expression of continental philosophy that critically engages the intersection of poetry, art, music, politics, and the erotic in an exploration of the power they have over us. While focusing on three key figures—Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger—this volume covers a wide range of material, from the Ancient Greeks to the vicissitudes of the politics of our times, and approaches these and other questions within their hermeneutic and historical contexts. Working from primary texts and a wide range of scholarly sources in French, German, and English, this book is an important contribution to philosophy's most ancient quarrels not only with poetry, but also with music and erotic love.
Download or read book You Must Change Your Life written by John T. Lysaker and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Not limited to a single poem or collection of poems, ur-poetry arises when, in the interaction of an author's principal tropes, the origin of poetry is exposed as a process whereby words with inherited meaning take on a new poetic life that draws our attention to the "birth of sense"--The manner in which the manifold realities that surround us are revealed. And it is precisely through an experience of the birth of sense that we are able to understand and dwell differently among these realities."--Jacket.
