Overview

Innovatively combining philosophical inquiry and aphoristic writing, this study presents a bold new interpretation of philosophical poetics. Exploring fragments, both thematically and formally, Luke Fischer situates the form as uniquely positioned between philosophy and poetry. Like poetry, fragments condense insights into few words, employ striking metaphors that draw intuitive connections, and make space for creative interpretation. Contrasting with the logical linearity of much philosophy, fragments disclose rather than prove, intimate more than argue, suggest a whole without elaborating a system, and emphasize the intuitive act of thinking. Fischer readjusts our understanding of philosophical ideas as they originate in moments of illumination, and reveals the fragment as philosophy in process. In a collection of original fragments and an exploratory essay, Fischer sheds light on the relation between poetry and philosophy, aesthetics and society, art and the environment, and discusses seminal practitioners of the fragmentary form, including Novalis, F. Schlegel, Nietzsche and Heraclitus. Philosophical Fragments as the Poetry of Thinking makes an engaging, nonlinear case for the possibility and significance of a poetic transmutation of philosophy.

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9781350270084

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Reviews

"In the tradition of J. G. Hamann (""Poetry is the mother tongue of the humen race""), Romantics such as Schlegel and Novalis (the fragment as the proper form of philosophy), and Nietzsche, Luke Fischer´s new monograph contains a meditation on the filigran relationships between fragment, poetry, and philosophy under modern conditions. The result is a beautiful book -- subtle, thought-provoking, inspiring, and rich with remarkable Geistesblitzen. -- Eckart Förster, Professor emeritus of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University, USA Enter Luke Fischer's rich fragmentary meditation on poetry and philosophy: you will learn that ""Poetry is the progressive incarnation of the logos"" and you will be changed by what you read. -- Kevin Hart, Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor, Duke University, USA"

"In the tradition of J. G. Hamann (""Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race""), Romantics such as Schlegel and Novalis (the fragment as the proper form of philosophy), and Nietzsche, Luke Fischer´s new monograph contains a meditation on the filigran relationships between fragment, poetry, and philosophy under modern conditions. The result is a beautiful book -- subtle, thought-provoking, inspiring, and rich with remarkable Geistesblitzen. -- Eckart Förster, Professor emeritus of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University, USA Enter Luke Fischer's rich fragmentary meditation on poetry and philosophy: you will learn that ""Poetry is the progressive incarnation of the logos"" and you will be changed by what you read. -- Kevin Hart, Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor, Duke University, USA As a fragment points to a whole, of which it is a part, so Luke Fischer’s fragments conduct us holistically into the living present. Capacious, provocative, scintillating, these poetic and philosophical fragments are saltations of intuitive insight, while the essay that follows is as comprehensive as it is illuminating. -- Paul Kane, Professor Emeritus of English, Vassar College, USA Luke Fischer’s rare synthesis of gifts, as a philosopher and poet, allows him to write—with uncommon clarity, authority and existential commitment, from that mysterious space between these disciplines—a work that performs what it claims, enlivening a neglected genre. -- Jakob Ziguras, poet, translator and philosopher, author of Venetian Mirrors Where can we find today an authentic heritage of German romantic philosophy? In Luke Fischer’s fascinating new monograph. The hidden Orphic undercurrent of the romantics resurfaces in an open manner in his profoundly meditative and poetic aphorisms. -- David W. Wood, Associate Editor of Symphilosophie: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism, University of Bonn, Germany"

Author Information

Luke Fischer is an Honorary Associate in Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia. His books include The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the ‘New Poems’ (2015), three books of poetry––most recently A Gamble for my Daughter (2022)––and the co-edited volumes The Seasons: Philosophical, Literary, and Environmental Perspectives (2021) and Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives (2019).

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