Iris Murdoch has long been known as one of the most deeply insightful and morally passionate novelists of our time. This attention has often eclipsed Murdoch's sophisticated and influential work as a philosopher, which has had a wide-ranging impact on thinkers in moral philosophy as well as religious ethics and political theory. Yet it has never been the subject of a book-length study in its own right. Picturing the Human seeks to fill this gap. In this groundbreaking book, author Maria (...) Antonaccio presents the first systematic and comprehensive treatment of Murdoch's moral philosophy. Unlike literary critical studies of her novels, it offers a general philosophical framework for assessing Murdoch's thought as a whole. Antonaccio also suggests a new interpretive method for reading Murdoch's philosophy and outlines the significance of her thought in the context of current debates in ethics. This vital study will appeal to those interested in moral philosophy, religious ethics, and literary criticism, and grants those who have long loved Murdoch's novels a closer look at her remarkable philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I want to investigate further a claim made by Martha Nussbaum and Wayne Booth, amongst others, that good literature can be morally valuable, by applying it to a certain kind of genre fiction: the modern harboiled detective novel.

Philosophy and Tragedy is a compelling contribution to that oversight and the first book to address the topic in a major way. Eleven new essays by internationally renowned philosophers clearly show how time and again, major thinkers have returned to tragedy in many of their key works. Philosophy and Tragedy asks why it is that thinkers as far apart as Hegel and Benjamin should make tragedy such and important strand of philosophy should present itself tragically. From Heidegger's reading of Sophocles' (...) Antigone to Nietzsche and Benjamin's book length studies of tragedy, Philosophy and Tragedy presents and outstanding and original study of this preoccupation. The five sections are organised clearly around five major philosophers: Hegel, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Benjamin. Contributors include: Walter Borgan, Jean-Francois Courtine, Francoise Dastur, Gunter Figal, Rodolphe Gasche, David Farrell Krell, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, William McNeill, Marc Froment-Meurice. (shrink)

Alison Denham examines the ways in which our engagement with literary art, and metaphorical discourse in particular, informs our moral beliefs. She considers to what extent moral and metaphorical discourses are capable of truth or falsehood, warrant or justification, and how it is that we understand these discourses. This vital new study offers a fresh view of the nature of the moral and the metaphorical, and the relations between art and morality.

The essays in this volume explore the ways in which traditional philosophical problems about self-knowledge, self-identity, and value have migrated into literature since the Romantic and Idealist periods. How do so-called literary works take up these problems in a new way? What conception of the subject is involved in this literary practice? How are the lines of demarcation between philosophy and literature problematised? The contributors examine these issues with reference both to Romantic and Idealist writers and to some of their (...) literary and philosophical inheritors and revisers. Their essays offer a philosophical understanding of the roots and nature of contemporary literary and philosophical practice, and elaborate powerful and influential, but rarely decisively articulated, conceptions of the human subject and of value. (shrink)

Despite his extended readings of parts of the Antigone of Sophocles, Heidegger nowhere explicitly sets about giving us a theory of tragedy or a detailed analysis of the essence of tragedy. The following paper seeks to piece together Heidegger's understanding of tragedy and tragic experience by looking to themes in his thinking – particularly his analyses of early Greek thinking – and connecting them both to his scattered references to tragedy and actual examples from Greek tragedy. What we find is (...) that, for Heidegger, tragedy is an interruption of speculation, a refusal to philosophize, a way of showing how things are that resonates with the goal of Heidegger's own thinking. (shrink)

Cognitivism in respect to the arts refers to a constellation of positions that share in common the idea that artworks often bear, in addition to aesthetic value, a significant kind of cognitive value. In this paper I concentrate on three things: (i) the challenge of understanding exactly what one must do if one wishes to defend a cognitivist view of the arts; (ii) common anti-cognitivist arguments; and (iii) promising recent attempts to defend cognitivism.

A viable theory of literary humanism must do justice to the idea that literature offers cognitive rewards to the careful reader. There are, however, powerful arguments to the effect that literature is at best only capable of offering idle visions of a world already well known. In this essay I argue that there is a form of cognitive awareness left unmentioned in the traditional vocabulary of knowledge acquisition, a form of awareness literature is particularly capable of offering. Thus even if (...) it is the case that literature has nothing interesting to give us in the way of knowledge, the literary humanist can consistently maintain that literary experience is thoroughly cognitive. (shrink)

Borges, Calvino, and Eco are as noted for the intriguing philosophical puzzles they present as they are for their inventive literary styles. In their writings, sequences of causality are reversed, individuals switch identities, and stories of one person mirror those of others. Literary Philosophers brings together a group of distinguished philosophers, literary scholars, and comparativists to explore and debate the relationship between philosophy and literature in the works of these brilliant figures.

As Lamarque agrees, to read philosophy is to read for truth, so if literary fiction non-accidentally conveys philosophical claims, Lamarque's anti-cognitivist position on it must be flawed. Deploying Iris Murdoch's notion of the ‘work’ an author does in a text, I try to expand what should be understood by an argument in this context, and thus address Lamarque's argument that literary fiction cannot non-accidentally convey philosophical claims because it typically contains no arguments. The main literary example is George Eliot's Felix (...) Holt ; special reference is made to the idea of an author's complicity with the reader. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In Reason's Grief, George Harris takes W. B. Yeats's comment that we begin to live only when we have conceived life as tragedy as a call for a tragic ethics, something the modern West has yet to produce. He argues that we must turn away from religious understandings of tragedy and the human condition and realize that our species will occupy a very brief period of history, at some point to disappear without a trace. We must accept an ethical perspective (...) that avoids pernicious fantasies about ultimate redemption but that sees tragic loss as a permanent and pervasive aspect of our daily lives, yet finds a way to think, feel, and act with both passion and hope. Reason's Grief takes us back through the history of our thinking about value to find our way. The call is for nothing less than a paradigm shift for understanding both tragedy and ethics. (shrink)

In Poetic Justice Martha Nussbaum undertakes to explain how “story-telling and literary imagining” can supply “essential ingredients in a rational argument” and thereby improve public discourse regarding important ethical, political, and legal issues.

Shakespeare continues to articulate the central problems of our intellectual inheritance. The plays of a Renaissance playwright still seem to be fundamental to our understanding and experience of modernity. Key philosophical questions concerning value, meaning and justice continue to resonate in Shakespeare's work. In the course of rethinking these issues, Philosophical Shakespeares focuses on and encourages the growing dissolution of boundaries between literature and philosophy. Philosophical Shakespeares includes contributions from the first rank of contemporary criticism, drawing together original and previously (...) unpublished essays by leading European and US scholars. The approach throughout is interdisciplinary and ranges from problem-centered readings of particular plays to more general elaborations on the significance of Shakespeare in relation to individual thinkers or philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Beckett and Philosophy examines and interrogates the relationships between Samuel Beckett's works and contemporary French and German thought. There are two wide-ranging overview chapters by Richard Begam (Beckett and Postfoundationalism) and Robert Eaglestone (Beckett via Literary and Philosophical Theories), and individual chapters on Beckett, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Badious, Merleau-Pointy, Adorno, Hebermas, Heidegger and Nietzsche. The collection takes a fresh look as issues such as postmodern and poststructuralist thought in relation to Beckett studies, providing useful overview chapters and original essays.

How best to introduce philosophical ideas? Is the best and only way by studying the history of philosophy and its rational arguments and discussions? But can literature, usually hived off from philosophy, be used instead and can this be as effective as rational argument? This paper explores these questions. First it considers a text which introduces philosophy through the analysis of literature, in particular James Joyce's 'Araby', arguing that the traditional analytic approach employed by the text, by concentrating on epistemology, (...) obscures other philosophical insights offered by Joyce. It then turns to French philosophy and literature and suggests that Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus by 'blurring' the analytic distinction between philosophy and literature have much to offer to the grasping and understanding of philosophical ideas and principles. (shrink)