Beginning with Plato's expulsion of the poets in the Republic, this dissertation
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looks at the often hostile, yet also symbiotic, relationship between·poetry and
philosophy. Aristotle's 'response' to Plato is regarded as a significant origin of
literary theory. Nietzsche's critique of Western philosophy as being an attempt to
suppress its own metaphoricity, leads to a revaluation of truth and consequently
of the privileging of philosophy over poetry. Post-structuralism sometimes
overemphasizes this constitutive force of metaphoricity, at the expense of
conceptual modes. However, Derrida's notion of philosophy as play retains a
balance between concept and metaphor: there is no attempt to transcendentally
ground philosophy, but neither is it reduced to a merely metaphorical discourse.
Finally, Wittgenstein's notion of meaning as determined by use can help us
distinguish pragmatically between poetry and philosophy by looking at the
contexts in which they function.Linguistics and Modern LanguagesM.A. (Linguistics
