This book introduces and explores Rational Poetic Experimentalism (RPE). According to RPE, it makes sense to regard reason as poetic. Regarding reason this way is the result of experimenting with philosophical ideas. Such experimentation might lead to philosophical truths which might seem very difficult to discover.

In recent years philosophers have produced important books on nearly all the major arts: the novel and painting, music and theatre, dance and architecture, conceptual art and even gardening. Poetry is the sole exception. This is an astonishing omission, one this collection of original essays will correct. If contemporary philosophy still regards metaphors such as 'Juliet is the sun' as a serious problem, one has an acute sense of how prepared it is to make philosophical and aesthetic sense of poems such W. B. Yeats's 'The Second Coming', Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy', or Paul Celan's 'Todesfuge'. The Philosophy of Poetry brings together philosophers of art, language, and mind to expose and address the array of problems poetry raises for philosophy. In doing so it lays the foundation for a proper philosophy of poetry, setting out the various puzzles and paradoxes that future work in the field will have to address. Given its breadth of approach, the volume is relevant not only to aesthetics but to all areas of philosophy concerned with meaning, truth, and the communicative and expressive powers of language more generally. Poetry is the last unexplored frontier in contemporary analytic aesthetics, and this volume offers a powerful demonstration of how central poetry should be to philosophy.

Yvor Winters has here collected, with an introduction, the major critical works--Primitivism and Decadence, Maule's Curse, and The Anatomy of Nonsense--of the period in which he worked out his famous and influential critical position. The works together show an integrated position which illuminates the force and importance of the individual essays. With The Function of Criticism, a subsequent collection, In Defense of Reason provides an incomparable body of critical writing. The noted critic bases his analysis upon a belief in the existence of absolute truths and values, in the ethical judgment of literature, and in an insistence that it is the duty of the writer--as it is of very man--to approximate these truths insofar as human fallibility permits. His argument is by theory, but also by definite example--the technique of the "whole critic" who effectively combines close study of specific literary works and a penetrating investigation of aesthetic philosophies.

This encyclopedia spans the relationships among business, ethics and society, with an emphasis on business ethics and the role of business in society.