Poet Philosophers

Abstract

Texts taught in a typical, contemporary academic philosophy curriculum include a wide variety of genres. While philosophers today are primarily taught to write academic articles and monographs, philosophers have historically experimented with a much broader range of literary forms, including dialogues, aphorisms, personal essays, confessions, epistles, meditations, autobiographies, and commentaries, in addition to treatises. Some Western philosophers, perhaps most famously Lucretius and Boethius, expressed their philosophical thinking in poetic form. For many philosophers, their chosen literary form is not merely one among several possible ways of clothing their thinking, but is essential to their thought. Consider Plato’s dialogues, Montaigne’s essays, Kant’s treatises, or Nietzsche’s aphorisms: in each case, the philosophy is inherently connected to the literary form and would be different if embodied in another genre. A similar diversity of literary form appears in Indian philosophical traditions, which have also included treatises, commentaries, dialogues, narratives, and poems. Much Indian Buddhist philosophy was written according to models of Sanskrit verse. Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu, and Śāntideva, for example, and many other prominent Indian Buddhist philosophers, wrote some of their most important works following Sanskrit poetic forms and integrated elements of dialogue. Thus, in some sense, many Indian Buddhist authors can be considered “poet philosophers.” The poet philosophers we consider in this part, however, are poetic in a stronger sense: their philosophy is not merely articulated in verse but embodied in song and narrative, and their poetic and literary forms do important philosophical work.