Courses

Since Plato, poets and philosophers have been at odds as often as they have cross-pollinated. How should we think about the relation between these two discourses? In this seminar we will put the following dictum of Romantic poet and philosophe Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s to the test:  “No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.” We will read philosophical poetry, poetic philosophy, and texts that don’t seem to quite fit in any genre. What makes certain poets particularly inspiring to philosophers, and vice versa? How does each group appropriate the tools of the other for their own purposes? We will especially interested in the question of how poetic language offers a mode of thinking that may be philosophical in character, but is also fundamentally different from the conceptual and argumentative constraints of philosophy as it is traditionally conceived.