What lies in a poem? | In-person

Scottish philosopher David Hume once described poets as ‘Liars by profession’ – and he wasn’t joking. 

More recently, some philosophers have dismissed poets as ‘not serious’, and poets haven’t been shy in responding with their own labels for philosophers.   

The animosity between both camps was ancient even in Plato’s day, and it still flares up. But why? 

The usual answer is that they have so little in common.  

It’s sometimes said that philosophers seek truth through argument, while poets seek beauty by whatever means they please. By looking closely at older and more contemporary poems, we may begin to see something else. Often, poetry seems so close to philosophy that it almost appears to be doing the job itself. 

Could tensions come not from their differences, but their similarities? Perhaps poetry is sometimes better at doing what philosophy tries to do? Surely, that could be reason for bad blood. 

Join Professor Maximilian de Gaynesford as he takes a closer at the poems that might make us reconsider the boundaries between philosophy and poetry. 

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SPEAKER: Professor Maximilian de Gaynesford
University of Reading

Maximilian de Gaynesford, formerly a Fellow of Lincoln College Oxford and Professor at the College of William and Mary, is now Professor at the University of Reading. His main interests are in the philosophy of mind and language and he has written several books, including I: The Meaning of the First Person Term (2006), The Rift in the Lute: Attuning Poetry and Philosophy (2017) and How to be Radical in Philosophy (2023).

Panellist: Prof. Don Paterson
Professor Emeritus of Poetry, University of St Andrews

Don Paterson is the author of sixteen books of poetry, aphorism, criticism, poetic theory and memoir, and the editor of several anthologies. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, and three Forward Prizes; he is the only poet to have won the T.S. Eliot Prize on two occasions. He taught poetry at the University of St Andrews and for twenty-five years was Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan. He is also Fellow of the English Association, the Royal Society of Literature. He received the OBE in 2008 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010.

Panellist: Professor Robert Crawford
Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Poetry, University of St Andrews

Robert Crawford’s nine collections of poetry include Full Volume (2008) and Old World (Cape, 2025). He also writes poetry in Scots. His work has won several awards and has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. With Simon Armitage he edited The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 and with Mick Imlah he edited The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. His biography of Robert Burns, The Bard, won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award, and his recent two-volume biography of T. S. Eliot has been described as ‘magisterial’. He lives in Edinburgh.

Chair: Professor Edward Harcourt
Academic Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College

Edward Harcourt is the Academic Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College. His research lies in moral psychology and on the boundaries between ethics and the philosophy of mind. He has published on topics including neo-Aristotelianism and child development; the ethical dimensions of psychoanalysis; love and the virtues; the philosophy of mental health and mental illness; and Wittgenstein.

In March 2022 he completed a four-year secondment to the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council as Director of Research, Strategy and Innovation. He currently works two days a week in Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry, where he leads on patient and public engagement for the Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre. He also directs Mind, Value and Mental Health: The Oxford Summer Schools in Philosophy and Psychiatry, which is due to meet again in Summer 2024.

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