Philosophers and Their Poets: Reflections on the Poetic Turn in Philosophy since Kant

Examines the role that poets and the poetic word play in the formation of philosophical thinking in the modern German tradition.

Several of the most celebrated philosophers in the German tradition since Kant afford to poetry an all-but-unprecedented status in Western thought. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer argue that the scope, limits, and possibilities of philosophy are intimately intertwined with those of poetry. For them, poetic thinking itself is understood as intrinsic...