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Introduction In his Harvard lecture series on poetry, Jorge Luis Borges reflects on the nature of metaphor, drawing from the ideas of the Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones. Lugones famously claimed that “all words are dead metaphors,” suggesting that every word was once a comparison but has since lost its original figurative meaning. Borges, with characteristic playfulness, immediately points out that this statement itself is a metaphor. In doing so, he critiques the rigidity of Lugones’s perspective, implying that similes are not static relics of the past but dynamic and creative forces within language. This article explores Borges’s view that language is a living system, where meaning emerges from the interplay between historical development, symbolic usage, and the speaker’s role in shaping interpretation. Metaphors can be "living" or "dead" depending on how actively their imagery is perceived. This perception, as Borges highlights, is tied to time and context,...

"We next went to the school of languages, where three professors sat in consultation upon improving that of their own country." Introduction Sigmund Freud once observed, "The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied." This quote, highlighted in a 1940 journal article by Philip R. Lehrman, underscores Freud's acknowledgment of the profound insights poets and philosophers had already gleaned long before the rise of modern scientific inquiry. Freud's other sentiment, "Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me," further illustrates the deep interplay between creative imagination and philosophical thought (Freud Museum London https://www.freud.org.uk/) In this article, we will explore the intricate relationship between poets and philosophers, especially focusing on their shared investigations into the nature of language. We will...