The aim of this article is to outline two philosophical approaches to metaphor that were developed in the 20th century. The first contends that metaphor opens up the possibility of liberating philosophical discourse from the prison of rigid conceptual schemes and can guide us to a new metaphysics founded on some deep, hidden, revelatory knowledge which eludes both empirical and rational inquiry. Paul Ricoeur, the author La metaphore vive (1975) is regarded as the main representative of this approach, but, as the article shows, his way of thinking about metaphor and its role made its appearance already in the 1920s and 1930s, and found its brilliant synthesis in Geneza metaforei şi sensul culturii, the second volume of the monmental Trilogia culturii by the Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga. The second approach was inaugurated by Nietzsche with his “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” and had its continuation in the thought of Heidegger, Derrida and De Man. Nietzsche insists that philosophical (metaphysical) discourse has no better claim to the truth than metaphor. Metaphor is at the root of language; metaphors are older than language; and metaphors underpin language in all its constructions and uses (rhetoric, tropology). Carried to its conclusion this argument leads to the dissolution of the borders between philosophy and poetry, and, in effect, the death of philosophy.