The Philosophy of PoetryJohn Gibson 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. |
Contents
| 1 | |
1 Semantic Finegrainedness and Poetic Value | 18 |
Reconciling Opposites | 37 |
How to Paint Things with Words | 63 |
4 Unreadable Poems and How They Mean | 88 |
5 Can an Analytic Philosopher Read Poetry? | 111 |
An Ontology of Poems | 127 |
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A. C. Bradley abstract Adam Adam’s Améry Améry’s analytic analytic philosophers attention Bachmann Cambridge Celan’s claim cognitive concept continuity thesis Criticism declaim density describe emotion essay ethical estrangement evaluative experience experience-taking experiencing-as experiential expression feeling first-personal form-content unity Fregean Giles Goodland Heresy of Paraphrase Houlihan human idea imagination Ingeborg Bachmann instantiation interpretation Journal of Aesthetics kind knowledge lines linguistic listening literal literary Lombardo Lühe lyric lyric poetry meaning metaphor Milton mind Mind’s modern object offers one’s ontology oral painting perception perhaps Peter Kivy philosophy of literature poem poem’s poet poet’s poetic language poetic opacity poetry poetry’s prose question reader reading rhythm seems semantic sense sentence sound Stanley Cavell Stevens Stevens’s Studies in Philosophy T. S. Eliot template thesis things thought tion tradition Troy Jollimore truth understanding Vronsky Wallace Stevens Wittgenstein words writing