The relationship between metaphor and philosophy is the main focus of this engrossing study by continental philosopher Giuseppe Stellardi. Three separately identifiable, but strictly interconnected, thematic directions are explored: (1) the theory of metaphor; (2) the theory of philosophical discourse; and (3) a close analysis of texts by Heidegger and Derrida for what they reveal about both metaphor and philosophical discourse. The works of these two specific philosophers are examined for a number of reasons: first, they attract questions that inevitably concern the meaning of philosophy itself; second, they make fundamental points concerning metaphor and its relationship to philosophy; third, the particular quality of their language is closely related to poetic discourse; and fourth, the relationship of their texts to metaphor give them an essential quality that can provisionally be described as "incompleteness."
Stellardi also includes a discussion of the fundamental debate on metaphor between Derrida and Ricoeur and a detailed examination of philosophy as a "mode of discourse" among (and in relation to) others. The result is an idea of philosophy as essentially imperfect and self-destructive, and yet indispensable in the economy of the modes of discourse.
Avoiding the obscurity that characterizes much philosophical writing on this complex subject, Stellardi presents a well-defined analysis in a clear and direct style.
