J. M. Cameron; XII—Poetic Imagination, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 219–240, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.

This paper traces Spinoza’s engagement with early-modern poetics. Historians of philosophy regularly locate Spinoza within the philosophical traditions of his time. I argue that, by placing him in a parallel poetic culture, we can extend our appreciation of the expectations and debates to which he is responding, and the ways he uses poetry in his philosophical work. I make three claims: that Spinoza’s conception of imagination is fundamentally poetic; that he offers a genealogical resolution to a debate (...) about the relative value of poetic inspiration and poetic art; and that he provides a carefully balanced analysis of the ways in which poetry can support philosophical understanding. (shrink)

The first comparative study of Heidegger and Schelling, recognizing Schelling's place in post-Kantian GermanIdealism and his contribution to Heidegger's later thought.

The essays in this 1996 volume explore the ways in which traditional philosophical problems about self-knowledge, self-identity, and value have migrated into literature since the Romantic and Idealist periods. How do so-called literary works take up these problems in a new way? What conception of the subject is involved in this literary practice? How are the lines of demarcation between philosophy and literature problematised? The contributors examine these issues with reference both to Romantic and Idealist writers and to some of (...) their literary and philosophical inheritors and revisers. Their essays offer a philosophical understanding of the roots and nature of contemporary literary and philosophical practice, and elaborate, powerful and influential, but rarely decisively articulated, conceptions of the human subject and of value. (shrink)

In response to Susan James’s ‘Spinoza and the poetic imagination,’ this essay illustrates how Spinoza and his interlocutors in the artistic society Nil Volentibus Arduum developed approaches to art and its social and political utility in conversation with Aristotle’s Poetics, as well as with its early modern translations, redactions, and applications. They, in turn, developed a poetry and a poetics grounded in the philosophical apprehension of nature, emphasizing vraisemblance or probability and necessity; foregrounding the careers of the affects; (...) and affording critics the ability to mobilize pleasure to their advantage and to shape audiences—a classicist project. (shrink)

This paper, therefore, ploughs the furrow of postcolonial history, memory and the poetic imagination deploying the poetry of the Nigerian poet Joe Ushie.In particular, the paper negotiates the Rwandan genocide as a tragic foreground of the imperial process through its indulgent, artificial fixing of boundaries to accomplish its empire-building project in Africa. But beyond the colonial mediation in, and onslaught on, the cultures of others, the paper argues that African societies have also been complicit in their agonistic and (...) violent history as the Rwandan genocide amply demonstrates. The paper concludes that a martial culture reminiscent of Civan, the warmonger, which manifests itself in private and especially public domains will only entrench intolerance, ethnocentrism, communal wars and violent death on the continent. (shrink)

These eight generous commentaries raise an inspiring array of questions about the relationship between philosophy and poetry as it was viewed by Spinoza and his contemporaries. Taken singly and tog...

This book examines the role Plato accords to imagination in the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Claiming that the function of imagination evokes a realm of praxis within Plato's dialogues heretofore largely unrecognized, this book offers an interpretation of Plato that challenges the more orthodox view in which poetry and the arts are denigrated, and indeed, seen as eradicable from the dialogues altogether.

Gaston Bachelard distinguishes the radical novelty and newness of the imagination from pre-existing sensory impressions. In this article, I explore Bachelard's connections between time, the imagined image and poetic form, and I consider their implications for the cinema. Concentrating my analysis on Ildikó Enyedi's Testről és lélekről/ On Body and Soul — a film that alternates between doubled worlds, depictions of human and animal life — I draw out the temporality and the diversity of Bachelard's imagined images. Bringing (...) Bachelard's instant, vertical time and the crystalline to bear on Enyedi's film, I argue that, under the pretext of sleep, rest and dreaming, On Body and Soul engages the temporality and attentiveness of the Bachelardian imagination, together with its poetic effects. (shrink)

Fourteen enjoyable papers, from the Theoretical Archaeology Conference held in Oxford in December 2000, which reflect on the relationship between archaeology and the outside world' and investigate the meaning of archaeology to the general public and the relevance of archaeology to society. Essays examine the development of archaeology as a discipline through the medieval, Romantic and Post-Modern eras, looking, for example, at the treatment of archaeological themes in the works of Mary Shelley and Byron. Contributors also consider the impact of (...) Stonehenge on astronomical studies, the influence of Roman finds and sites, including Bath and Caerleon, on Edwardian jewellery and children's stories and the dramatisation of the Iceman's' discovery in a recent play. (shrink)

The subject of this research is, first of all, the ontological and phenomenological aspects of the prototype as a category and a kind of phenomenon in the field of art and poetic imagination. The research is carried out mainly on the material of the phenomenological-dialectical concept of A. F. Losev and the phenomenology of the poetic imagination of G. Bashlyar. The historical, philosophical and theological contexts of the concept of the prototype of Losev are revealed. The (...) emphasis is made on the ontological meaning of expression and the prototype, on the ontology of aesthetic and art. Losev's concept, as well as the "direct ontology" of the poetic image in the concept of Baschlyar, are applied to the artistic material that organically meets them. These are the texts of N. Gogol: "Sorochinskaya Fair", "The Night before Christmas", "Terrible Revenge", "Old World landowners", "Viy". The theme of the prototype as an archetype revealing the deep semantics of art has been sufficiently developed, in particular, based on the material of K. Jung's analytical psychology. The novelty of this study includes several aspects. Firstly, based on Z. Freud's approach to the close connection of the infantile-personal and the archaic in the psyche in the interpretation of this artistic material, Freud and Jung's approaches are combined, it is concluded that archaic and eroticism in the primordial element are merged into one whole, therefore it is not necessary to categorically oppose these two approaches to each other, at least when referring to archetypal material. Secondly, this study focuses on the ontological and phenomenological aspects of the prototype, which are not given enough attention in various studies. Thirdly, the study combines concepts such as phenomenological-dialectical, phenomenology of poetic imagination, intertextual analysis in relation to the subject of the prototype, which in their interaction allow us to more fully reveal the primitive element of art. All this can contribute to the creation of a holistic concept of the prototype in art and in the sphere of poetic imagination. (shrink)

This essay considers the role of the imagination in the envisioning and poetic construction of future being and becoming in Amazonia. Poetic construction is the process whereby the assembled forms that emerge from the imagination are brought out into the world of the senses. Imaginative envisioning and poetic construction are the means by which diverse ontologies of humans, animals, and spirits are articulated into particular visions of future transformation that posit a becoming from humanity to (...) otherness in Amazonia. This essay seeks to elucidate the conscious processes through which cosmological ideas are imaginatively envisioned and poetically constructed by Amazonian societies as visions of future transformation and becoming from human to nonhuman being. (shrink)

What is Imagination? What is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in a contemporary civilization dominated by the image? How can we reconcile the right to imagine with the right to justice? Are the claims of artistic creativity and moral responsibility compatible? With an extended foreword and an afterword chapter, and fascinating new material on the narrative imagination, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern provides a critically developed and accessible account of the major theories of imagination in (...) modern European thought. It analyses and assesses the decisive contributions made to our understanding of the imaginary life by phenomenology (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard), hermeneutics (Heidegger, Ricoeur), and post-modernism (Vattima, Kristeva, Lyotard). Richard Kearney achieves this with a coherent and committed approach, which displays his own passionate concern for the claims of imagination in our post-modern world of fragmentation and fracture. This is essential reading for those interested in current leading debates on the role of imagining in continental philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, art theory and literary criticism. (shrink)