Philosophy and Literature (syllabus)

PHIL 375: Philosophy and Literature University of British Columbia Don Beith Fall 2015

2014

Literature and philosophy have long shared an interest in questions of truth, value, and form. And yet, from ancient times to the present, they have oft en sharply diverged, both in their approach to these questions and in their relationship to one another. Moreover, the vast diff erences among individual writers, historical periods, and languages pose challenges for anyone wishing to understand the relationship between them. Th is Introduction provides a synthetic and original guide to this vast terrain. It uncovers the deep interests that literature and philosophy share while off ering a lucid account of their diff erences. It sheds new light on many standing debates and off ers students and scholars of literary criticism, literary theory, and philosophy a chance to think freshly about questions that have preoccupied the Western tradition from its very beginnings up until the present.

2019

Edited by Università di Pisa License Creative Commons Odradek. Studies in Philosophy of Literature, Aesthetics and New Media Theories is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial 4.0 International.

Literature – Literary Studies – Philosophy: Problems of Relation, Languages, and Communication, 2013

The cluster of problems of the relations among literature, philosophy, and literary studies does not belong among issues that have been resolved, methodologically defi ned, or exhaustively described. It is diffi cult to speak in this respect of the existence of some "grammar", of a model that would indicate all possible connections between them.

Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media, 2019

I analize the relationship between Philosophy and Literature. First, there is an essencial historical summary, then, I analize the contrasting positions of Derrida and Habermas about this topic. Finally, I use their considerations to give an answer to three fundamental questions regarding the relation between Philosophy and Literature: 1) Is philosophy still able to be a useful tool for describing the truth? 2) Is literature capable to describe contingent realities and not just universal ones? 3) Is it possible to conceive a relationship between Philosophy and Literature without subordinating one to another?

2019

This forward-thinking, non-traditional reference work uniquely maps out how new developments in 21st century philosophy are entering into dialogue with the study of literature. Going beyond the fam ...

In the article “The Fusion of Philosophy and Literature in Nihilist Thought” (Problemos 2010, 77) I argued that post-metaphysical philosophy should intensify its dialogue with literature to the point of their eventual fusion. In this paper I will start from the conclusions of my previous article and will highlight two possible lines of this fusion: 1) The disappearance of the boundary between reality and fiction. Once we let go of the correspondence theory of truth, as Vattimo recommends, we will arrive at the principled possibility of the truthfulness of any and all narratives. Nihilist thought is characterised by a weakened sense of reality, a renouncement of common sense and naturalism. This condition, described by Nietzsche, where making a distinction between the real world and tall tales is impossible in principle, has several far-reaching epistemological and ethical consequences. 2) In its fusion with literature, nihilist thought seeks for a language to articulate the nothing, to represent the unrepresentable. In the paper I will analyse this pursuit by way of the concepts of postmodernity, the space of literature, and anxiety. I will draw on the views of Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes and Jean-François Lyotard. By fusing with literature, nihilist philosophy can continue in a situation where it has nothing to say.

In the literary tradition covering more than two and a half thousand years, philosophy has been frequently mentioned in close proximity to literature, often as different ways of engaging more or less the same activity. We shall look at this matter briefly in the paper. What is not often said, even though many would probably not object to the idea is that literary criticism is a philosophical, rather than a scientific discipline, insofar as it is exercised by the need to understand, lacking the means to explain the phenomenon it is faced with. Three things really are at issue here: literature, literary studies/criticism, and philosophy. There are interrelationships among them, which is why some of the most important works relevant to the study of literary phenomena are by philosophers, normally the very greatest ones among them. We will not be exploring this history in detail, but only the engendering of literary criticism as a result of the philosophical interest in the literary, of which Plato and Aristotle were apparently the first to devote to it sustained attention. But we shall find that evolution and change within the history of criticism have been by following, sometimes without a conscious decision, the methods of reflection inaugurated in Aristotelian metaphysics in which philosophy is established as the knowledge of things through their ultimate causes.

The relationship between literature and philosophy is almost as old as the two academic disciplines themselves. Indeed, for a very long time, philosophy has been interested in literature and vice versa. Some philosophers like Kant, Hegel, or Schopenhauer among many others-have had recourse to epic, lyrical or dramatic poets because they realized, literary works can help them in their philosophical efforts to convey the message of truth, well-being, wisdom in society. The obstacle which prevented them from having recourse to it seemed to be the thread of the metaphysical tradition. But not everything can happen through metaphysics alone to be understood, useful in society. Thus, because of their stakes and their style, philosophies of existence rub shoulders even more closely with literary works. This applies to Heidegger, to Marcel, an admirer of Rilke, to Camus, a novelist before becoming an essayist, to Merleau-Ponty whose appeals to Valéry, Claudel or Proust are never accidental, to Sartre for whom the works of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet, and Flaubert counted as much as those of the philosophers. This article takes an analytical look at the relationship that may exist between literature and philosophy through language.