Philosophy and Literature

Catherine Moreland is commonly seen as a charming naïf, beguiled by bad books and bad company into odd obsessions, until chastened by experience and love. Some moral philosophers see their discipline as beguiled by an obsession of its own—a fixation on the proper application of a small set of words. Austen is sometimes recruited to discredit such tendencies. Yet how should a chastened moral philosophy proceed? Seeing Catherine otherwise than as a faux gothic heroine reveals the promise in a neglected direction: scrutinize practices that support our unstudied inclinations to take as natural particular ways of applying concepts.