Jan Zwicky

Janine Louise Zwicky (born 10 May 1955) is a Canadian philosopher, poet, essayist, and musician.

She was appointed to the Order of Canada in June 2022.

Zwicky received her BA from the University of Calgary and earned her PhD at the University of Toronto in 1981 where her studies focussed on the philosophy of logic and science.

She subsequently taught philosophy at Princeton University; philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities at the University of Waterloo; philosophy at the University of Western Ontario; philosophy, English, and creative writing at the University of New Brunswick; and philosophy at the University of Alberta.

She has served as a faculty member at the Banff Centre Writing Studio, has conducted numerous writing workshops, and served as an editor for Brick Books from 1985 to 2018.

Zwicky is Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, where she taught both philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities courses from 1996 until 2009.

Songs for Relinquishing the Earth won the award in 1999.

Robinson's Crossing won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2004.

Her 2011 book, Forge, was shortlisted for the 2012 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.

From 2017 through 2019, she was the series editor of Oskana Poetry and Poetics, an imprint of the University of Regina Press.

Zwicky's philosophical work challenges the hegemonic status of logico-linguistic analysis in 20th and 21st century Anglo-American philosophy.

She is a realist who aims to defeat analytic skepticism by exploring the relationship between philosophical and poetic thinking, and by developing the notions of resonance and lyric understanding in ontology and epistemology:

"Lyric shares with the coherentists, pragmatists, and nihilists the view that foundationalism is intellectually bankrupt: that what analytic system cannot sustain is anything like the claim of naive realism. However, lyric shares with naive realism the view that skepticism is false. What it does not share is the view that it is demonstrably, within system, false."

(Lyric Philosophy L264)

Her books, Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor, discuss but also enact this idea of resonance.

They consist of many voices that range across diverse disciplines, so that Zwicky's aphoristic remarks on the left-hand pages are read with and against excerpts from the history of philosophy, musical scores, paintings, photographs, and poems on the right-hand pages.

While Zwicky orders her remarks carefully and has a linear philosophical argument to make, each page is also designed to evoke remarks or images from other pages, prompting non-linear connections and directly demonstrating what she refers to as lyric structure, characterized by resonance.

Zwicky believes that Heraclitus, Plato, and Wittgenstein have purposefully constructed philosophical texts in this way before her.

She cites Freud's distinction between primary and secondary processes, as well as Max Wertheimer's work in gestalt psychology, as support for the concepts she promotes.

She references pieces of music, works of art, and natural eco-systems as objects that also exhibit lyric structure.

Zwicky presents logical analysis and lyric thinking as complementary and includes both in a broader, more total conception of reason.

She believes that the Anglo-American notion of what constitutes good philosophy is excessively narrow, and criticizes Continental and poststructural views for their anti-realist vision of the world as nothing more than a projection of human thought and desire.

Zwicky promotes balance, arguing that neglect of either logical or lyric thinking leads to our ontological, epistemological, ethical and environmental peril.

James O. Young, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria has said: "There's a reasonable chance that people will be reading her work a century from now. This is something that one says about only a very small number of philosophers."

Zwicky's poetry is influenced by music in the classical European, blues, and jazz traditions.

It also deals with the natural world, and has often been cited for its intense lyricism.

Thirty-seven Small Songs and Thirteen Silences has appeared in Swedish (translated by Roy Isaakson; Palaver Press).

Numerous individual poems have been translated into Czech, French, German, Serbian, Spanish and Italian.

Among her many accolades, both Zwicky's Songs for Relinquishing the Earth and Robinson's Crossing were shortlisted for Governor General's Awards for Poetry.