Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language, and Poeticity

The later Wittgenstein famously holds that an understanding which tries to run up against the limits of language bumps itself and results in nothing but plain nonsense. Therefore, the task of philosophy cannot be to create an ‘ideal’ language so as to produce a ‘real’ understanding for the first time; its aim must be to remove particular misunderstandings by clarifying the use of our ordinary language. Accordingly, Wittgenstein opposes both the sublime terms of traditional philosophy and the formal frameworks of modern logics—and adheres to a pointedly casual, colloquial style in his own philosophizing. However, there seems to lurk a certain inconsistency in Wittgenstein’s ordinary language approach: his philosophical remarks frequently remain enigmatic, and many of the terms Wittgenstein coins seem to be highly technical. Thus, one might wonder whether his verdicts on the limits of language and on philosophical jargons might not be turned against his own practice. The present essay probes the extent to which the contravening tendencies in Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy might be reconciled. Section 2 sketches Wittgenstein’s general approach to philosophy and tracks the special rôle that the language of everyday life occupies therein. Section 3 reconstructs Wittgenstein’s preferred method for philosophy, which he calls perspicuous representation, and argues that this method implements an aesthetic conception of philosophy and a poetic approach to philosophical language, in which philosophical insights are not explicitly stated, but mediated through well-worded and creatively composed descriptions. Section 4 discusses how Wittgenstein’s philosophical poetics relates to artificial terminologies and grammars in philosophy and science.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus as Poetic Philosophy and Philosophical Poetics

This article argues that it is helpful to discuss the logico-philosophical contents of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in terms that confront the poetic and literary qualities of its form and style. To begin with, it analyzes Wittgenstein's short remarks about expression as manifested in the “tone” of Georg Trakl's poetry and the “ineffability” of Ludwig Uhland's poem “Count Eberhard's Hawthorn.” Then it proceeds to consider his exchange of letters with Gottlob Frege about the form and style of the Tractatus. The final part of the article considers such Tractarian metaphors as “showing and saying,” “logical space,” “reflecting the world as in a mirror,” “ineffability,” and “climbing and throwing away a ladder.” The proposed examination concentrates mainly on the distinction—but also the connection—between what, through language as used in both philosophy and poetry, can be said and what can be shown, this being one of the central themes of the Tractatus itself. It is then claimed that the roots of Wittgenstein's later understanding of both “ordinary language” and the connection between philosophy, poetry, and the ethical form of one's life are already present in his first period of creativity.

Metaphor of Cosmos–as–Polis in the Stoic Teaching and its Ethical and Communicative Consequences

This article is considering origins of Stoic representation of Cosmos as The Universe State and there is briefly tracing its totemistic preconditions, which were proceeding from the primitive mythopoetic thinking’s specifics. Furthermore, there is proving a thesis about that the metaphor of Cosmos-Polis has emerged from searchings of an adequate philosophical language by early Greek thinkers, and that sociomorphical code was one of the most important metaphorical models of Cosmos in ancient philosophical poetics, not only for Stoics. A great number of political doctrines by Plato and faraway in the postplatonic tradition, including Stoa, were arising on the fundament of the this code. There is considering character of some Stoic ethical contradictions and is offering an attempt of resolving them through allocation of horizontically-civil and vertically-divine links in the Stoic teaching, which were containing peculiar dual system of communication of stoic sage with Cosmos.

Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus

Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives sheds new light on the philosophical significance of Rilke’s late masterpiece The Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), which Rilke wrote during an intensive period of inspiration in the winter of 1922. While the Duino Elegies (completed during the same period) have historically received more critical and philosophical attention than the Sonnets, this volume serves to remedy the relative neglect and illustrates the unique character and importance of the Sonnets as well as their significant connections to the Elegies. The volume features eight essays by philosophers, literary critics, and Rilke scholars, which explore a number of the central themes and motifs of the Sonnets as well as the significance of their formal qualities. An introductory essay (coauthored by the editors) situates the book in the context of philosophical poetics, the reception of Rilke as a philosophical poet, and the place of the Sonnets in Rilke’s oeuvre. The book’s premise is that an interdisciplinary approach to poetry, and more specifically to Rilke’s Sonnets, can facilitate crucial insights with the potential to expand the horizons of philosophy and criticism. The wide-ranging essays elucidate the relevance of the Sonnets to phenomenology and existentialism, hermeneutics and philosophy of language, philosophical poetics, philosophy of mythology, metaphysics, modernist aesthetics, feminism, ecocriticism, animal ethics, and philosophy of technology.

Antyczna filozofia i poezja: zły glina, dobry glina

Autor omawia książkę Ancient philosophical poetics Malcolma Heatha, który stara się w niej przybliżyć czytelnikom zarówno akademickim, jak i spoza specjalistycznego kręgu poglądy filozofów na poezję. Czyniąc zastrzeżenie, że nie jest to rozprawa o tym, jak wyglądała teoria literatury w czasach starożytnej Grecji, ale o tym, jak filozofia spoglądała na poezję, Heath ukazuje poglądy filozofów na prawdę i dobro w poezji. Jakkolwiek najczęściej jest to pogląd o niższości poezji wobec filozofii (angielski badacz skupia się na filozofii Platona i platoników, choć także Arystotelesa), to autor Ancient philosophical poetics udowadnia ostatecznie, że np. słynne platońskie wezwanie do wygnania poetów z państwa jest w istocie wezwaniem do wnikliwego ich czytania. Autor omówienia jego książki ukazuje w związku z tym wywód Heatha jako przykład bardzo współczesnej, a jednocześnie nieanachronizującej postawy wobec antycznej filozofii i poetyki.