Abstract

It might not be striking that writers expressing the same idea, or a similar reaction to an idea, would use a similar set of words if they were writing in the same language.In the examples to follow, I remain unsure as to whether I should be struck by the similarity or not; it was a nice coincidence at first, a mere "interesting observation" rather than a "striking similarity," from which I could begin an article comparing the poetics of Ibn Sīnā with the aesthetics of Kant. The observation was that three different writers, in reacting to a similarity they observed between Ibn Sīnā and other thinkers in domains related to poetics and/or imagination, used the two words "striking" and "similarity," or at least their...