Since the mid-2010s, the problem of overcoming individualism and social atomization through group solidarity has been a central motif of Russian political poetry. New responses to this issue primarily employ feminist optics and an intersectional approach: at the crossroads of gender, nation, and society, authors as diverse as Galina Rymbu, Oksana Vasyakina, Elena Fanaylova, and Maria Galina all explore possibilities for linking the poetic subject to the construction of a group consciousness or collective. I propose that a hallmark of this tendency is the increased frequency and ingratiating use of first-person plural pronouns. This “we index” (the ratio of the number of these pronouns to the number of lines in a text) seems to demonstrate a direct correlation to the author’s degree of thematic interest in the problem; meanwhile, the example of Ilya Rissenberg also shows how the solidarity motif functions in political poetry with a low “we index.”

In contemporary Russian poetry, a special movement has emerged that engages in political activism under the feminist banner. This form of political poetry aims less at criticism and subversion than at making a direct social impact. Poems are written as per-formative forms of social action and often with a concrete purpose. They aim to resist power and take the side of the oppressed. The poetic subject opens her voice and her body in solidarity with others or courageously opposes the establishment through provocation — even aggression.

On the “Flowing Movement” and the “Lofty and Ancient” in Gary Snyder’s Poetry Gary Snyder, a renowned 20th century American poet, has been strongly influenced by Eastern cultures, especially Chinese. The philosophical spirit of Eastern culture and its intuitive way of thinking have taken root in Snyder’s mind and directly shaped his perception of nature. Hence, in view of the inadequacy of Western literary criticism in interpreting the Eastern dimensions of Snyder’s poetry, this article takes the classical Chinese literary theory “Twenty-Four Styles of Poetry” as its theoretical perspective and uses its categories of “Flowing Movement” and “Lofty and Ancient” to explore how the dissolved or solitary poetic self achieves the mental state of “emptiness” (kong in Chinese Taoism and sunyata in the Buddhist sense) and creates the poetic worlds of the “flowing movement” and the “lofty and ancient” (transcendence) in Snyder’s poems.

Francis Ponge’s work represents a highly reflective concept of writing. His attempt to come close to nature is determined by the conviction that this approach has to be taken by an almost monastic respect for the phenomena and has to eschew abstract notions and generalizations. His project of writing is a deeply moral one; it pursues a type of representation that involves the subject and does not conceive the world he approaches by writing as an object. In order to grasp the essence of this author’s work, Jacques Derrida’s monograph “Signéponge” is adduced, which is the most enlightening contribution on Ponge to have ever been made. Furthermore, it will be shown that Ponge’s work relates to issues that are central to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin and the language theory of Walter Benjamin.

This article aims to reconstruct the reception of pre-Socratic philosophy, especially that of Parmenides, in Russian modernism and avant-garde literature. In doing so, it places this reception into two contexts: the contemporary discussion of pre-Socratic ideas in Russian, European and American philosophy, on the one hand, and the proclamation of a third, a Russian and/or Slavic Renaissance, on the other. This Renaissance has been conceived as the intense discussion and reconsideration of ideas, notions, and expressions of ancient Greek thinking. It aimed also to avoid the reduction of Greek philosophy to Plato, as had been practiced by the Russian Orthodox Church and largely pushed through in Russian culture. One of the main points of this reconsideration concerned the quest of the relation between the word, the process of thinking, and human life, while another one connected with it involved the (re-)establishment of a close bond between the poetic word, its meaning, and its sense. The integration of this productive discussion with pre-Socratic Greek philosophy enriches and improves our knowledge of Russian modernism and avant- garde literature.

The claim that a thinker concerned with the development of a totalizing metaphysical system can be a literary philosopher may seem hard to justify. For Arthur Schopenhauer, the entire world is the representation or appearance of the will to life, the metaphysical essence of all being. And yet, because this will must always appear and always take form, it is only formally that we can grasp it, only in concrete instances. For this reason, the poet “shows us how the will behaves under the influence of motives and reflection. He presents us this for the most part in the most perfect of its appearances” (WWRII, 310). In this paper, I will argue that Schopenhauer founds a philosophical approach which comes to rest on literary foundations and which alights at key moments on the strength of his literary as well as his philosophical forebears. I will do this by means of looking at how Schopenhauer treats the concept of fate. It is my contention that the fatalism inherent in Schopenhauer’s ethics is a direct result of a fundamentally literary approach to the concept. This enables us to conceive of fate from a literary and not solely from a metaphysical standpoint. I will begin by outlining the place of the literary in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, including a brief account of those writers whose work he incorporates into his analysis, and then I will demonstrate its relation to his fatalism.

In Hegel’s “Lectures on Aesthetics”, poetry bears special relevance to the thesis of the spiritualization of art, the way of the medium from stone to word. The theoretical basis for this thesis rests on Hegel’s epistemic concept of intuition (Anschauung), representation (Vorstellung), and concept (Begriff ), as well as the components developed in this context for a modern semiology – a philosophical theory of signs and language. Poetry is considered as the most general, most comprehensive, and most spiritual art. A new kind of self-relation is constituted: imagination is related to imagination, representation to representation. Hegel unfolds a gradation from intuitive and imagining self-understanding – from art and religion – towards self-relational thought, a conceptual cognition of philosophy with its basis in the self-thinking thought (das Denken des Denkens). An intermingling of the forms of poetic and philosophical expression is to be avoided; crucial is a clean distinction between the forms of presentation proper to literature and to philosophy respectively, between the “army of metaphors” and the “phalanx of concepts” (Begriffe).

A diachronic approach to the relationship between literature and philosophy since antiquity needs to include the field of rhetoric, regardless of whether it appears as a link or a disruption. This article discusses fundamental questions of rhetoric, philosophy, and poetics in the example of invisible characters and their moral qualities in antiquity and the mid-18th century. Plato’s mythical literary version of the Gyges legend in the “Republic” conceives of the invisible character as an illustration of the morally depraved nature of humans. In the following, I shall not trace this “Gyges problem” in the terms of influence studies but rather with an awareness of the ubiquity of ancient knowledge in philosophy and literature of the 18th century. I shall situate Adam Smith’s oft-discussed metaphor of the invisible hand in the context of his lectures on rhetoric, which were instrumental in founding the tradition of the Scottish New Rhetoric. I shall argue that invisibility forms a central element of Smith’s definition of character. The manifold implications of such a conception of invisible characters will then be illustrated using the example of Eliza Haywood’s “The Invisible Spy” (1755) and her conception of authorial ethos. Thus, the metaphor of invisibility proves itself to be of transhistorical relevance for the relationship between philosophy and literature, especially when they both turn to character – understood as fictional person, moral constitution, and the medium of the letter.

This paper takes up the topic explored by Wolfgang G. Müller in this volume and discusses the various forms in which Carneades’ thought experiment was conceptualized and employed in philosophy, science, and law, as well as literature and film of the 20th and 21st centuries. Of course, it will not be possible to address all instances – in particular in popular culture, where the dilemma raised by Carneades resurfaces in ever new metaphorizations – and I will have to focus on some theoretical aspects, a few practical cases, and a variety of patterns and motifs that emerge in literary works or films. In some variants, the elements of the thought experiment have changed to a certain degree, but the underlying dilemma is still clearly recognizable. Of particular importance in recent discussions is the so-called trolley problem and research into cognitive responses to the dilemma. A second approach can be found in evolutionary theory and the discussion of altruism and self-sacrifice, both of which do not seem to be compatible with the struggle for survival as described in Darwinism. In the realm of law, the case of Mary and Jodie Attard forced a court decision on whether a human being should be killed in order to save the life of the conjoined sibling: similarly, but on a different scale, controversial discussions following the aftermath of 9/11 have involved the question as to whether a plane with possibly hundreds of passengers should be shot down to prevent an even larger catastrophe. Each of these theoretical concepts and their very real considerations have had their impact on literature and cinema, and this paper offers a survey of the most important narrative patterns and examples.

This essay attempts to establish an ethics of literature, which, as distinct from earlier approaches, is transgenerically oriented in that it does not focus on narrative alone but on the three main literary genres of narrative, dramatic, and lyric art. It follows Wittgenstein’s much-quoted dictum that aesthetics and ethics are one. Its basic assumption is that ethics emerges in literature under the condition of aesthetic form. The much-discussed problem of the relation between philosophy and literature is found in the concept of the proposition, which, in Aristotle, who uses the term apophansis, means a statement, assertion, or predication. In philosophy, the proposition is, as Gottfried Gabriel emphasizes in his monograph on cognition (2015), an essential element within deductive processes of argumentation, contributing to proving a theoretical position or working out a theoretical position. In literature, propositions usually do not occur in extended argumentative contexts. They make a statement that may have a significant philosophical and specifically ethical impact and that may relate to the entire works concerned. Hence, the concept of propositionality makes it possible to relate and simultaneously differentiate the two great achievements of the human mind: philosophy and literature. In the essay’s analytic part attention is given to specific ethical dilemmas in Homer’s “Iliad” and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, the representation of evil in Shakespeare’s tragedies, narrative strategies for presenting ethical situations and events in nineteenth-century novels (Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Twain, Tolstoy), and the occurrence of ethical elements in lyric poetry. As far as the lyric genre is concerned, we take note of the paradoxical fact that even in the object poetry of Rilke and the imagists (Williams), an ethical aspect emerges. A common result of textual analysis is the recognition of propositional elements in all texts investigated.