Online research in philosophy

This article addresses the question whether and how literary documents can be used to further our understanding of a number of key issues on the agenda of the philosophy of biology such as “complexity” and “reductionism”. Kant already granted a certain respectability to aesthetical experiences of nature in his third Critique. Subsequently, the philosophical movement known as phenomenology often used literary sources and literary techniques to criticize and question mainstream laboratory science. The article discusses a number of literary documents, from Moby-Dick to Jurassic Park, that explicitly stage a confrontation between scientific and non-scientific ways of experiencing and understanding the natural world. Special attention is given to the work of Michael Crichton. Its relevance for the philosophy of biology is pointed out.

Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers—among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature , first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarme;, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.

It has been suggested that we might treat the meaning of literary works as a matter of their function. In this paper I investigate what such an account might look like, given a defensible theory of artificial functions. I consider two teleological accounts of work meaning: one that takes the meaning of a literary work to be determined by its design function and one that takes meaning to depend on use function. It might be thought that an account centring on design functions would be a robustly intentionalist account; in contrast, I argue that such an account would take authors' intentions to be one factor among others determining the meaning of literary works. An account centring on use functions will be a robustly anti-interpretationalist account; but I argue that it is a less attractive version of the account, because it cannot distinguish between a reasonable and an unreasonable reading of a literary work.

Introduction I propose in this work, first, to consider the process of doing ontology and, second, to argue for the importance which an understanding of ...

In this work, the author elaborates on his position on philosophy and ontology. Not only does he defend critical ontology and metaphysics but he also dismisses any kind of speculative ontology and metaphysics as epistemologically untenable. Furthermore, in this work, the author puts together for the first time his relationalist theory of being, called “ontic relationalism" .

During the last decades, there has been a debate on the question whether literary works are utterances, or have utterance meaning, and whether it is reasonable to approach them as such. Proponents of the utterance model in literary interpretation, whom I will refer to as ‘utterance theorists,’ such as Noël Carroll and especially Robert Stecker, suggest that because of their nature as linguistic products of intentional human action, literary works are utterances similar to those used in everyday discourse. Conversely, those whom I will refer to as ‘appreciation theorists,’ such as Stein Haugom Olsen and Peter Lamarque, argue that literary works are by no means comparable to conversational utterances, and treating them in terms of utterances mistakenly dismisses their literary features.

The aim of this essay is twofold: to defend a central aspect of the utterance theory and to reconcile the two main positions about central issues in the debate on the meaning of literary works. On the one hand, I shall argue that it is both legitimate and reasonable to discuss the utterance meaning of a literary work on the basis of an interpretative approach interested in the author’s “message.” My aim is to show that literary works should be considered utterances in a conversational approach which aims at examining the illocutionary actions conveyed through the work. On the other hand, I attempt to show both that there are various legitimate interpretative approaches which are governed by the interpreter’s purposes and to suggest that the debate between utterance theorists and appreciation theorists is actually about merely different emphases.

This thesis investigates the nature of Senecan ontology by looking closely at metaphorical language, quotation and intertextual engagements in Seneca's Epistulae 33, 90, 86 and 84. Senecan ontology is deeply embedded in language and articulated through metaphor, narrative and intertextual engagement with both literary and philosophical traditions. An important aspect of this investigation is developing an improved view of Senecan hermeneutics, in particular how Seneca reads and how Seneca’s readers might read him.

While Roman Ingarden is well known for his work in aesthetics and studies in ontology, one of his most important and lasting contributions has been largely overlooked: his approach to a general ontology of social and cultural objects. Ingarden himself discusses cultural objects other than works of art directly in the first section of “The Architectural Work”1, where he develops a particularly penetrating view of the ontology of buildings, flags, and churches. This text provides the core insight into how his more lengthy studies of the ontology of works of art in The Literary Work of Art and the rest of The Ontology of the Work of Art, combined with the ontological distinctions of Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, may be used to understand social and cultural objects. The view that results, I will argue, is based in foreseeing problems with the reductivist and projectivist views that remain popular, and is capable of resolving central problems still thought to plague those who would offer a theory of cultural objects.

The essays in this collection are concerned with the philosophical problems that arise in connection with the understanding and evaluation of literature - such problems as the relationship between the work and the author (authorial intention), between the work and the world (reference and truth), the definition of a literary work, and the nature of literary theory itself. Professor Olsen attacks many of the orthodoxies of modern literary theory, in particular the enterprise to build a comprehensive systematic literary theory. His own work is informed by a consistent perspective: the assumption that literature is a social institution governed by conventions, and that answers to problems of interpretation and appreciation can be found only through an analysis of these conventions. This is an important book for scholars and students of literary theory and philosophy, especially for those who see an ever-increasing cross-fertilization between the two disciplines.