The Philosophy of Poetry

This volume of eleven original essays presents a strong case for the need for poetry to be taken seriously by contemporary analytic aesthetics. In particular, it highlights the way in which issues arising from a concern with poetry intersect with a wide variety of debates drawn from across the field of philosophical aesthetics. As John Gibson comments in his introduction, poetry offers a kind of ‘philosophical hub at which the interest of philosophers of literature, music, and the visual arts can come together and mingle in unexpected and fruitful ways’ (4). But equally, Gibson wishes to make clear poetry’s potential for offering insight into other areas of philosophy including philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology and ethics. This is important since a large gap in the philosophy of literature has opened up over the last 65 years, with very little attention paid to this major art form despite its prominence in the literary cannon. However, this is not to say that there have not been some excellent attempts to provide such focus on poetry, as Gibson acknowledges, most notably the special issue of Midwest Studies in Philosophy published in 2009, which made great progress in opening up this exciting and unique field of study. We should, therefore, see this collection of essays as moving us another step forward in consolidating the philosophy of poetry as an important area of philosophical aesthetics

Aesthetics · Analytic philosophy · Art · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · Field (mathematics · Literature · Metaphysics · Philosophical theory · Philosophy of mind · Poetry · The arts · Variety (cybernetics · Visual arts · Computer Science · Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art · Philosophy