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32 Speech Acts, Responsibility, and Commitment in Poetry
Get accessMAXILIMIAN DE GAYNESFORD is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, having previously been a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. He has written a number of articles on the relationship between philosophy and poetry, as well as on the philosophy of mind and language. He is the author of I: The Meaning of the First Person Term (2006), Hilary Putnam (2006) and John McDowell (2004), and has edited a volume of essays on the philosophy of action, Agents and Their Actions (2011).
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Published:16 December 2013
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Abstract
Philosophy has tended to regard poetry primarily in terms of truth and falsity, assuming that its business is to state or describe states of affairs. Speech act theory transforms philosophical debate by regarding poetry in terms of action, showing that its business is primarily to do things. The proposal can sharpen our understanding of types of poetry; examples of the ‘Chaucer-Type’ and its variants demonstrate this. Objections to the proposal can be divided into those that relate to the agent of actions associated with a poem, those that relate to the actions themselves, and those that relate to the things done. These objections can be answered. A significant consequence of the proposal is that it gives prominence to issues of responsibility and commitment. This prominence brings philosophical debate usefully into line with contemporary poetry, whose concern with such issues is manifest in characteristic forms of anxiety.
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