Like poetry, fragments condense insights into few words, employ striking metaphors that draw intuitive connections, and make space for creative interpretation. Contrasting with the logical linearity of much philosophy, fragments disclose rather than prove, intimate more than argue, suggest a whole without elaborating a system, and emphasize the intuitive act of thinking. Fischer readjusts our understanding of philosophical ideas as they originate in moments of illumination, and reveals the fragment as philosophy in process. In a collection of original fragments and an exploratory essay, Fischer sheds light on the relation between poetry and philosophy, aesthetics and society, art and the environment, and discusses seminal practitioners of the fragmentary form, including Novalis, F. Schlegel, Nietzsche and Heraclitus. Philosophical Fragments as the Poetry of Thinking makes an engaging, nonlinear case for the possibility and significance of a poetic transmutation of philosophy.
Luke Fischer is a philosopher and poet. His various books include The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the ‘New Poems’ (Bloomsbury, 2015), three books of poetry––most recently A Gamble for my Daughter (Vagabond Press, 2022)––and the co-edited volumes The Seasons: Philosophical, Literary, and Environmental Perspectives (SUNY Press, 2021) and Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2019). He holds a PhD from the University of Sydney where he is also an Honorary Associate in Philosophy. For more information, visit: www.lukefischer.net
