Marcello Frixione on Philosophy and Poetry: Pragmatic Mechanisms in Poetic Language

In an interview, philosopher and poet Marcello Frixione (born 1960), who teaches Logic and Philosophy of Cognitive Sciences at the University of Genoa, discusses the relationship between philosophy and poetry. He argues that poetry can be considered a use of ordinary language where certain pragmatic mechanisms, such as implicatures as theorized by Paul Grice, are accentuated. Frixione rejects essentialist definitions, favoring Wittgensteinian family resemblances. He notes that recent analytic philosophy of literature has focused on narrative, but a shift is occurring, exemplified by John Gibson's 2015 volume 'The Philosophy of Poetry' (Oxford University Press). Frixione's own research draws on Grice's pragmatics, suggesting that poetic language operates through violations of conversational maxims, generating 'pseudo-implicatures' with less precise propositional content than ordinary implicatures. He emphasizes that these mechanisms are not unique to language but appear in other communication forms. Frixione also reflects on his dual role as philosopher and poet, acknowledging a growing connection between the two spheres. He considers poetry's cognitive value and expressive potential, and proposes that the quality of a poem may be judged by its ability to reveal something new over time, not merely to endure. The interview is part of the 'Dialoghi di Estetica' series by Davide Dal Sasso, a researcher in aesthetics at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca.