Poetry and Poetics in the Presocratic Philosophers

Poetry and Poetics in the Presocratic Philosophers
Author: Tom Mackenzie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 110884393X

The first book-length, literary-critical study of the Presocratic philosopher-poets, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles. Sheds new light on these authors' philosophical projects and enriches our appreciation of their works as literary artefacts, also arguing that they played an important role in the development of Greek poetics.

The Poetics of Philosophical Language

The Poetics of Philosophical Language
Author: Zacharoula A. Petraki
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110260972

A close analysis of the Republic's diverse literary styles shows how the peculiarities of verbal texture in Platonic discourse can be explained by Plato's remolding of tropes and techniques from poetry and the Presocratics. This book argues that Plato smuggles poetic language into the Republic's prose in order to characterize the deceitful coloration and polymorphy that accompanies the world of Becoming as opposed to the Real. Plato's distinctive discourse thus can transmit, even to those figures focused on the visual within his Republic, the shiftiness of the base and the unjust.

Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice

Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice
Author: Charles Bambach
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2013-05-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438445814

A new reading of justice engaging the work of two philosophical poets who stand in conversation with the work of Martin Heidegger. What is the measure of ethics? What is the measure of justice? And how do we come to measure the immeasurability of these questions? Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice situates the problem of justice in the interdisciplinary space between philosophy and poetry in an effort to explore the sources of ethical life in a new way. Charles Bambach engages the works of two philosophical poets who stand as the bookends of modernity—Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and Paul Celan (1920–1970)—offering close textual readings of poems from each that define and express some of the crucial problems of German philosophical thought in the twentieth century: tensions between the native and the foreign, the proper and the strange, the self and the other. At the center of this philosophical conversation between Hölderlin and Celan, Bambach places the work of Martin Heidegger to rethink the question of justice in a nonlegal, nonmoral register by understanding it in terms of poetic measure. Focusing on Hölderlin’s and Heidegger’s readings of pre-Socratic philosophy and Greek tragedy, as well as on Celan’s reading of Kabbalah, he frames the problem of poetic justice against the trauma of German destruction in the twentieth century.

Parmenides and Empedocles

Parmenides and Empedocles
Author: Parmenides,
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1725229609

Parmenides and Empedocles, along with Heraclitus the most important of the pre-Socratic philosophers, were at the same time among the greatest poets of the ancient world. But their work is rarely treated and still more rarely translated in its original form--as poetry. The complete extant fragments of Parmenides and Empedocles are collected here for the first time in a translation responsive to the original verse texts. Parmenides' philosophical fragments are here given as the poetic remains of the thinker from Elea in Southern Italy whom Socrates wondered at and Plato held in awe. What emerges from the poetry is at once an uncompromising vision of absolute Being and a compassionate understanding of the human cosmos: It is the body grows to Mind. All men desire the same thing, apprehend the same The plenum is thought, and thought preponderates. The poetry of Empedocles--reincarnationist, naturalist, cosmologist, religious leader, physiologist, and a metaphysician--is presented here in the personal idiom of the fifth-century Sicilian who has been called the last of the Greek shamans: I have already been A bush and a bird A boy and a girl A mute fish in the sea.

The Bacchic Gold Tablets and Poetic Tradition

The Bacchic Gold Tablets and Poetic Tradition
Author: Mark McClay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2023-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108833780

Analyses the Bacchic gold tablets from Greek mystery cults as products of performance culture and early Greek poetry.

Poetry and Poetics in the Presocratic Philosophers

Poetry and Poetics in the Presocratic Philosophers
Author: Tom Mackenzie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1108922384

Of the Presocratic thinkers traditionally credited with the foundation of Greek philosophy, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles are exceptional for writing in verse. This is the first book-length, literary-critical study of their work. It locates the surviving fragments in their performative and wider cultural contexts, applying intertextual and intratextual analyses in order to reconstruct the significance and impact they conveyed for ancient audiences and readers. Building on insights from literary theory and the philosophy of literature, the book sheds new light on these authors' philosophical projects and enriches our appreciation of their works as literary artefacts. It also expands our knowledge of the genres in which they wrote, of the literary culture of the Western Greek world, and of the development of Greek poetics from the Archaic to the Classical periods, exposing the influence of these thinkers on more famous Sophistic and Platonic ideas about literature.

Wallace Stevens and Pre-Socratic Philosophy

Wallace Stevens and Pre-Socratic Philosophy
Author: Daniel Tompsett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2012-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113630388X

This book studies Wallace Stevens and pre-Socratic philosophy, showing how concepts that animate Stevens’ poetry parallel concepts and techniques found in the poetic works of Parmenides, Empedocles, and Xenophanes, and in the fragments of Heraclitus. Tompsett traces the transition of pre-Socratic ideas into poetry and philosophy of the post-Kantian period, assessing the impact that the mythologies associated with pre-Socratism have had on structures of metaphysical thought that are still found in poetry and philosophy today. This transition is treated as becoming increasingly important as poetic and philosophic forms have progressively taken on the existential burden of our post-theological age. Tompsett argues that Stevens’ poetry attempts to ‘play’ its audience into an ontological ground in an effort to show that his ‘reduction of metaphysics’ is not dry philosophical imposition, but is enacted by our encounter with the poems themselves. Through an analysis of the language and form of Stevens’ poems, Tompsett uncovers the mythology his poetry shares with certain pre-Socratics and with Greek tragedy. This shows how such mythic rhythms are apparent within the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and how these rhythms release a poetic understanding of the violence of a ‘reduction of metaphysics.’

The Poetics of Philosophical Language

The Poetics of Philosophical Language
Author: Zacharoula Petraki
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2011-07-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3110262169

A close analysis of the Republic’s diverse literary styles shows how the peculiarities of verbal texture in Platonic discourse can be explained by Plato’s remolding of tropes and techniques from poetry and the Presocratics. This book argues that Plato smuggles poetic language into the Republic’s prose in order to characterize the deceitful coloration and polymorphy that accompanies the world of Becoming as opposed to the Real. Plato’s distinctive discourse thus can transmit, even to those figures focused on the visual within his Republic, the shiftiness of the base and the unjust.

Hesiod and the Beginnings of Greek Philosophy

Hesiod and the Beginnings of Greek Philosophy
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2022-05-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004513922

This fascinating volume rethinks the relationship between early Greek philosophers and the epic poet Hesiod, by presenting fifteen studies that offer different perspectives on matters of style, genre, intertextuality and the history of ideas.

Brill’s Companion to Classical Reception and Modern World Poetry

Brill’s Companion to Classical Reception and Modern World Poetry
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2022-12-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004529276

The volume combines for the first time the fields of Classical Reception and World Literature in a pioneering collection of essays by world-leading scholars on modern poetry from various cultural and linguistics backgrounds (Arabic, Chinese, creole, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Spanish).