Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking (Thinking Literature)

By: Andrea Gadberry

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Synopsis: What is thinking? What does it feel like? What is it good for? Andrea Gadberry looks for answers to these questions in the philosophy of René Descartes and finds them in the philosopher’s implicit poetics. Gadberry argues that Descartes’s thought was crucially enabled by poetry and shows how markers of poetic genres from love lyric and elegy to the puzzling forms of the riddle and the anagram betray an impassioned negotiation with the difficulties of thought and its limits. Where others have seen Cartesian philosophy as a triumph of reason, Gadberry reveals that the philosopher accused of having “slashed poetry’s throat” instead enlisted poetic form to contain thought’s frustrations. Gadberry’s approach to seventeenth-century writings poses questions urgent for the twenty-first. Bringing literature and philosophy into rich dialogue, Gadberry centers close reading as a method uniquely equipped to manage skepticism, tolerate critical ambivalence, and detect feeling in philosophy. Helping us read classic moments of philosophical argumentation in a new light, this elegant study also expands outward to redefine thinking in light of its poetic formations.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
Book Size:: 224 Pages
ISBN-13:: 9780226723167
Related ISBNs:: 9780226723020, 9780226722979
Publisher:: University of Chicago Press
Date of Addition:: 03/20/21
Copyrighted By:: N/A
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: History, Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts, Philosophy
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.