Poetics Today, vol. 28, no 3 (automne 2007) - Genres of philosophy II

Poetics Today brings together scholars from throughout the world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to the study of literature (e.g., semiotics and narratology) and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works. Poetics Today presents a remarkable diversity of methodologies and examines a wide range of literary and critical topics. Several thematic review sections or special issues are published in each volume, and each issue contains a book review section, with article-length review essays.


Vol. 28, n^o 3 (automne 2007)


John Sellars
Justus Lipsius's De Constantia: A Stoic Spiritual Exercise
This essay offers an introduction to Justus Lipsius's dialogue De Constantia, first published in 1584. Although the dialogue bears a superficial similarity to philosophical works of consolation, I suggest that it should be approached as a spiritual exercise written by Lipsius primarily for his own benefit.

Eugenio Canone and Leen Spruit
Rhetoric and Philosophical Discourse in Giordano Bruno's Italian Dialogues
The Renaissance writers adapted the dialogue form to represent the culture they were creating, using it for numerous subjects: philosophy, ethics, politics, religion, the arts, the study of language, and literature. The dialogue was an appropriate form for works which are at once serious, ironical, and critical. Giordano Bruno's Italian dialogues are a case in point. This essay scrutinizes the structure of these works, with special attention to the role of the interlocutors in his rhetoric.

Louis Groarke
Philosophy as Inspiration: Blaise Pascal and the Epistemology of Aphorisms
In five stages, this essay works out an account of the aphorism as a philosophical genre. First, I outline a preliminary, general strategy for elucidating the aphorism as an expression of "aphoristic consciousness." Then I discuss Blaise Pascal's aphoristic style, concentrating on exegetical issues surrounding his Pensées. Next, I demonstrate that aphoristic consciousness (understood in an appropriately epistemological sense) has been a constant (though now largely unrecognized) theme in the history of Western philosophy. Following this survey of Pascal's predecessors, I show how Pascal's own epistemological account of the aphorism reiterates and encapsulates this traditional understanding in its own distinctive way. And finally, I provide a new theoretical account of the aphorism as a literary and philosophical form, for which Pascal's thought provides both a theoretical framework and an excellent example.

Laura Byrne
The Geometrical Method in Spinoza's Ethics
While the goal of Spinoza's Ethics has strong affinities with the Aristotelian goal of eudaimonia, structurally the text itself is modeled on Euclid's Elements. Does Spinoza think that the precision and certainty of mathematics can be extended to moral philosophy? To answer this question, I discuss the relation between the geometrical method of the Ethics and its content and goal. Arguing that the deductive structure of the Ethics mirrors the causal necessity by which all of nature follows from God, I conclude that Spinoza applies the geometrical method to ethics because nothing, including human life and well-being, is exempt from this causal necessity. Furthermore, I discuss the role the geometrical method plays in an aspect of the argument of the Ethics which can best be described as dialectical, in the Aristotelian sense of the word: Spinoza hoped to persuade the members of his circle of theologically radical yet devout friends, and others intellectually similar to them, of the truth of his philosophy by beginning with Cartesian principles they would accept. Finally, I argue that certain nongeometrical portions of the Ethics are directed at the emotions of these readers.

George Pattison
Kierkegaard and Genre
Noting the apparent chaos of Søren Kierkegaard's writing, the essay shows that Kierkegaard did, nevertheless, have a highly self-conscious relation to issues of genre, which was a central concern in the aesthetic theory of his critical role model, J. L. Heiberg. Salient features of Heiberg's aesthetics are discussed and their echoes in Kierkegaard's writing illustrated. Kierkegaard is also aware that Heiberg's schema of genres breaks down in the face of modernity and such modern art forms as the novel. Here Mikhail Bakhtin (a reader of Kierkegaard) can help us see a carnivalistic transgression of classical genre definitions at work in Kierkegaard's writing. This, in turn, can be shown to relate to Kierkegaard's fundamental religious concerns and to reflect the carnivalesque destabilization of social, cultural, and artistic forms enacted in the paradoxical figure of the God-man.

Garry L. Hagberg
Wittgenstein's Voice: Reading, Self-Understanding, and the Genre of Philosophical Investigations
Since the time of Socrates and perhaps even that of Heraclitus, philosophical reflection has found expression in some form of autobiographical or selfinterrogative work; one of the outstanding exemplars of this mode of philosophical engagement was Augustine's Confessions. This mode and that book particularly exerted a profound influence on Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in a fairly self-contained sector of his masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations, we see a modernized version of such self-interrogation in action. In his remarks on the experience of reading—a familiar experience that we all too easily take to conform to a Cartesian model—we witness a mind confronting its own temptations to simplify, to adopt misleading philosophical "pictures" or conceptual templates, to hypothesize phantom mental events to fulfill the needs of an unwittingly adopted explanatory schema. And those pictures of reading, as we see here, generate corollary pictures of "self-reading," of autobiographical writing. A close look at Wittgenstein's self-monitoring analysis, however, reveals the conceptual intricacies of reading and, by extension, some of the parallel intricacies of self-understanding.

Ray Monk
Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding
This article discusses recent attempts to provide the genre of biography with a philosophical, theoretical foundation and attempts to show that such efforts are fundamentally misguided. Biography is, I argue, a profoundly nontheoretical activity, and this, precisely, makes it philosophically interesting. Instead of looking to philosophy to provide a theory of biography, we should, I maintain, look to biography to provide a crucially important example and model of what Ludwig Wittgenstein called "the kind of understanding that consists in seeing connections." This kind of understanding stands in sharp contrast to the theoretical understanding provided by science and is, Wittgenstein maintained, what we as philosophers are, or should be, striving for.