The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College

London and the LMU in Munich, online at History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Say It with Poetry, Chaucer and Langland.

I'm intrigued by the slogan Say It with Flowers, which has been used in advertising for florists and as the title of a 1934

British film, because it seems to me the range of things one can say with Flowers is really pretty small.

Beyond, I love you, I'm sorry, and I bear you seething resentment and

happen to know that you're allergic to flowers, nothing much leaves to mind.

But I like the idea of saying things in an unexpected way, the Mafiosi and the Godfather, who deliver messages in the form of a horse's head or a package of dead fish, or the Roman gods, who made their will known through the movement of birds and the behavior of sacred chickens.

We tend to avoid such flights of fancy when it comes to philosophy, expecting philosophical ideas to be expressed straightforwardly in treatises and other didactic texts full of arguments.

But a glance through history shows that philosophy has often travelled in other guises,

and in particular in works that can be described

as literature.

From Plato's dialogues and the Upanishads to Nietzsche's thus spoke Zarathustra and the novels of Iris

Murdoch, there have been works that could as naturally

be studied in literature departments as in philosophy departments.

We're already familiar with this phenomenon in the medieval period, having explored the philosophical ideas of Dante and before him,

allegorical works like the Romance of the Rose and Alan of Lille's lament of nature.

At the very least, we can look to literature to learn about the wider cultural impact of philosophy

as it was being pursued in the rarefied context of the schools and universities.

We might ask more from literature though.

Couldn't a novel, play, or poem express philosophical ideas in an original way, even a way that a treatise or textbook cannot?

In this episode we're going to test that hypothesis by looking at two literary authors of the

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