The Philosophy of Poetry

Front Cover
John Gibson
Oxford University Press, 2015 - Philosophy - 253 pages
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 howcentral poetry should be to philosophy.
 

Contents

 The Place of Poetry in Contemporary Aesthetics
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
7 Poetry and Truth
149
 So What Do We Know?
162
 Pictures Poetry and Epistemic Value
183
10 The Inner Paradise
205
 Poetry Ingeborg Bachmanns Poetics and her Bohemia Poem
232
Index
251
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About the author (2015)

John Gibson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville. His research focuses on topics in the philosophy of literature and aesthetics. He is the author of Fiction and the Weave of Life (OUP, 2007) and coeditor of Narrative, Emotion and Insight (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), The Literary Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2004), A Sense of The World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge(Routledge, 2007), and the forthcoming The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature. He is currently working on a manuscript titled Poetry, Metaphor, and Nonsense: An Essay on Meaning.

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