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A philosophical study of T.S. Eliot's Four quartets

This study of Eliot's "Four Quartets", written by a philosopher, stresses the relation of philosophy and of poetry to the actualities and the choices of living.

Philosophical finesse : studies in the art of rational persuasion

This book puts forward an interpretation of rationality which is much broader than the one underlying the current polarity between analytic and continental philosophy. It will help to reaffirm a range of ideas which have long been pushed to the sidelines by the dominance of the geometric model of philosophical argument. Descartes's dream of attaining a 'certitude equal to the demonstrations of Arithmetic and Geometry' reinforced the assumption that rationality must be assessed in terms of logical structure. Against this, Pascal invoked the notion of 'finesse', and Warner extends Pascal's usage in this book to specify a related set of informal but legitimate styles of argument.

The aesthetics of argument

Argument and imagination are often interdependent. The Aesthetics of Argument is concerned with how this relationship may bear on argument's concern with truth, not just persuasion, and with the enhancement of understanding such interdependence may bring. The rationality of argument, conceived as the advancement of reasons for or against a claim, is not simply a matter of deductive validity. Whether arguments are relevant, have force, or look foolish-or whether an example is telling or merely illustrative-cannot always be assessed in these terms. Martin Warner presents a series of case studies which explore how analogy, metaphor, narrative, image, and symbol can be used in different ways to frame one domain in terms of another, severally or in various combinations, and how criteria drawn from the study of imaginative literature may have a bearing on their truth-aptness. Such framing can be particularly effective in argumentative roles which invite self-interrogation, as Plato saw long ago. Narrative in such cases may be fictional, whether parabolic or dramatic, autobiographical or biographical, and in certain cases may seek to show how standard conceptualizations are inadequate. Beyond this, whether in poetry or prose and not only with respect to narrative, the "logic" of imagery enables us to make principled sense of our capacity to grasp imagistically elements of our experience through words whose use at the imaginative level has transformed their standard conceptual relationships, and hence judge the credibility of associated arguments. Assessment of the argumentative imagination requires criteria drawn not only from dialectic and rhetoric, but also from poetics.

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