61 books match the query 'Dialogue' and 2 start with p

cover of Philosophy in Dialogue: Plato's Many Devices

Philosophy in Dialogue

Plato's Many Devices

Gary Alan Scott

Northwestern University Press, 2007

Traditional Plato scholarship, in the English-speaking world, has assumed that Platonic dialogues are merely collections of arguments.  Inevitably, the question arises:  If Plato wanted to present collections of arguments, why did he write dialogues instead of treatises?  Concerned about this question, some scholars have been experimenting with other, more contextualized ways of reading the dialogues.  This anthology is among the first to present these new approaches as pursued by a variety of scholars.  As such, it offers new perspectives on Plato as well as a suggestive view of Plato scholarship as something of a laboratory for historians of philosophy generally.
            The essays gathered here each examine vital aspects of Plato’s many methods, considering his dialogues in relation to Thucydides and Homer, narrative strategies and medical practice, images and metaphors.  They offer surprising new research into such much-studied works as The Republic as well as revealing views of lesser-known dialogues like the Cratylus and Philebus.  With reference to thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, and Sartre, the authors place the Platonic dialogues in an illuminating historical context.  Together, their essays should reinvigorate the scholarly examination of the way Plato’s dialogues “work”—and should prompt a reconsideration of how the form of Plato’s philosophical writing bears on the Platonic conception of philosophy.
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cover of Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres

Poetry and Its Others

News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres

Jahan Ramazani

University of Chicago Press, 2013

What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system—“suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse,” in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But in Poetry and Its Others, Jahan Ramazani reveals modern and contemporary poetry’s animated dialogue with other genres and discourses. Poetry generates rich new possibilities, he argues, by absorbing and contending with its near verbal relatives.
 
Exploring poetry’s vibrant exchanges with other forms of writing, Ramazani shows how poetry assimilates features of prose fiction but differentiates itself from novelistic realism; metabolizes aspects of theory and philosophy but refuses their abstract procedures; and recognizes itself in the verbal precision of the law even as it separates itself from the law’s rationalism. But poetry’s most frequent interlocutors, he demonstrates, are news, prayer, and song. Poets such as William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden refashioned poetry to absorb the news while expanding its contexts; T. S. Eliot and Charles Wright drew on the intimacy of prayer though resisting its limits; and Paul Muldoon, Rae Armantrout, and Patience Agbabi have played with and against song lyrics and techniques. Encompassing a cultural and stylistic range of writing unsurpassed by other studies of poetry, Poetry and Its Others shows that we understand what poetry is by examining its interplay with what it is not.
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