Poetry and philosophy in Aristotle’s Poetics

Abstract

One of the darkest parts of the Poetics is the sense in which poetry, specially tragedy, is philosophical and enunciates the universal. The philosophical aspect of tragedy is commonly understood as cognitive, what means that poetry is more philosophical than history. The article purpose is to enlight the sense of the aristotelian thesis and to discuss on the base of a comparison of the manners in which history and poetry present destructive and violent actions. Some passages of Herodoto's History are selected to achieve this goal, as well as some tragic examples, in order to comprehend what Aristotle could have meant with this parallelism.