T.S. Eliot might have become as famous as a philosopher as he did as a poet. (If you enjoy his poetry, you'd know it really is a kind of sensuous philosophy, especially the Four Quartets.) His first--and I think true--conversion was from philosophy to poetry. His doctoral dissertation, which was never presented, is a testament to that. These ideas are the soil from which much of Eliot’s poetry springs; here's a 13-point primer:
1. Reality is a convention, a theory we all choose to believe in.
2. There is no objective, absolute, ultimate reality, but only realities.
3. Knowledge has no object; there are no real, stable objects to know; knowledge begins with faith.
4. Outside a context there are no answers; within a context there are no questions.
5. The proper study of reality is the study of words.
6. Philosophers ought to be poets.
7. Philosophy should be an analysis of words, not an analysis of things.
8. Language does not describe reality, it is continuous with it.
9. The description of an object depends upon perspective.
10. Words connote, they do not denote.
11. Words are coterminous with what they connote.
12. The explainer asks questions about what she calls reality, not realizing that she invents and constructs reality as she asks those questions.
13. The best kind of describer goes around the object she is describing and asks others what they see.
Philosophy, Eliot considered, should become a genre of prose writing. The proper study of philosophy is the study of fictions at work; it should not be a quest for ultimate reality; it ought to describe not explain.
Eliot admired Aristotle for being the philosopher most careful with words.
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