A poetic exception to the instruction "Know thyself"

2009

Is it possible that Giorgio Agamben has never written a poem? But he is not alone in this attitude: many commentators seem to think that poetry is a gift, that poetry is beyond or above the poor demands of reason, that poetry 'just happens' without the effort of practice and technique that comes to play in other modes of writing. At first blush this seems to elevate poetry above the common herd of human activity, but like every placement on a pedestal, it comes at a cost: elevated, poetry is left (largely) outside everyday life. It misses out, in the grand scheme of things. Who queues for poetry? Where are the urgent readers waiting for the next release, as they do for Harry Potter or Dan Brown? Which are the university courses that focus entirely on poetry and its meanings, rather than just sliding it in to a prose-oriented literary studies or creative writing course? Of course poetry has its place: there are the poetry slams, pub poetry, street corner poetry. There's guerrilla poetry on city walls, there are the collectives of pastoralists and lyricists, the language poets appear as a breed apart, and there are always the bush poets and other traditionalists. But, by and large, poetry is a matter of preaching to the choir, a marginal mode of writing. Is poetry just the middle child of writing? Perhaps: but, as Agamben goes on to note: 'every authentic poetic project is directed toward knowledge'. In this paper I want to re-envisage poetry and its place in the grand scheme of (writing) things: What does poetry know? Towards what knowledge is it directed? And how can we tell?

Axon, 2014

Following from Karl Popper's notion of 'subjectless' knowledge, this article argues that poetry, like the other arts and sciences can be construed as a distinct 'world'. This world is constituted by internal relations both in a structural and an intertextual sense. Utilising Yury Lotman's formalist-structuralist approach, the difference between an internal relation and an external relation is made clear through a close reading of John Kinsella's 'The Silo', where the antipastoral elements are shown to be in an external relation to it, whereas the gothic mode is in an internal relation. A close reading of Philip Salom's Keepers trilogy further explores the kind of knowledge possessed by poetry.

Is poetry a topic for philosophical reflection? This paper seeks to argue that it is by exhibiting poetry as a form of knowledge. What the claim that poetry is a form of knowledge amounts to, is that something can be knowledge in virtue of being poetical and poetical in virtue of being the (kind of) knowledge it is. Various kinds of skeptical doubt about this claim are considered. It is argued that such doubts are based on distorting pictures of poetry. Two strategies to justify the claim that poetry is a form of knowledge shall be explored. The first strategy is a broadly Wittgensteinian one, relying on grammatical reminders. The second strategy is a broadly Hegelian one, exhibiting poetry as a form of knowledge by showing that the concepts of two other forms of knowledge – practical and second-person knowledge – due to internal incoherences, point beyond themselves towards the concept of poetry.

Epoché, 2007

In this essay I take up Plato's critique of poetry, which has little to do with

2014

The purpose of this paper is to defend an expressivist analysis for the truthconditional meaning of self-knowledge ascriptions. First, we present the two theses about self-knowledge on which we shall focus, Strong Authority and Presumptive Authority; thereafter, we offer a contrast between the kind of expressivism which we will be advancing and some of its major competitors, grouped under the label ‘descriptivism’. Through the introduction of several different cases, we present some of the data that a theory needs to accommodate in order to successfully analyze attitudinal avowals: self-knowledge ascriptions are not always authoritative, or non-authoritative, in any sense. Finally, we will argue that the kind of expressivism that we favor gives the most parsimonious analysis of these attributions, and thus should be considered better than its alternatives.

Tematy i Konteksty, 2020

The author discusses the autothematic motifs in the poems Sitowie by Julian Tuwim and Przeciwne wiatry by Tomasz Rozycki. The author analyses bothpoems and compares the transformations of the autothematic motifs, emphasizing the connections with literary tradition and the dialogue of the poets’ artistic attitudes. In both literary works the key problem is the relation between words and things.

In this chapter, attention is drawn to expressivist accounts of self-knowledge. These reject the idea that self-knowledge is a robust cognitive achievement and hold that psychological avowals are ways of giving immediate expression to one's mind. In Wittgenstein, avowals are seen as profoundly different from third-personal mental ascriptions, in point both of truth-aptness and of meaning. This also entails that there is nothing as self-knowledge properly so regarded. What goes by that name, rather, are the ideas of groundlessness, transparency and authority, that in turn are a by-product of " grammar " —that is to say, of the rules governing the relevant language games. Next, Dorit Bar-On's recent version of expressivism is discussed. In her view, avowals are linguistic acts with a truth-apt semantic content. Yet her further idea that avowals can indeed express a special kind of knowledge is criticised. Also, Bar-On's idea that there can be genuinely false yet sincere and warranted avowals is shown wanting. Ultimately, it appears that expressivism as an all-encompassing theory about knowledge of all kinds of mental states we may enjoy is problematical.

Kneller Lecture, 2007

That literary scholarship is experiencing an "ethical turn" has become something of a commonplace, and seminal to this "turn" is the use of literary works as examples in moral-philosophical arguments. So far, however, ethical criticism has dealt almost exclusively with narrative texts-little work has been done on poetry. I argue that considering poetry in this context not only expands the corpus of exemplary works but also reveals methodological caveats applicable to ethical critics of poetry and fiction alike. Poetic examples raise new doubts about the moral authority of literature-doubts elided in the narrative-based discussions that currently prevail.

Apeiron, 2014

When Socrates says, for the only time in the Socratic literature, that he strives to “know himself” (Phdr. 229e), he does not what this “self” is, or how he is to know it. Recent scholarship is split between taking it as one’s concrete personality and as the nature of (human) souls in general. This paper turns for answers to the immediate context of Socrates’ remark about self- knowledge: his long diatribe about myth-rectification. It argues that the latter, a civic task that Socrates’ dismisses as too laborious, nevertheless serves as a model for the more personal former task. Both involve piecemeal acknowledgement and adjustment of one’s commitments for the sake of living successfully. Both require looking simultaneously to general facts about people (or the world) and to particular facts about oneself (or one’s city). Socrates’ hope that he differs from Typhon (230a) means that he hopes he is amenable to rectification.