A Panenmentalist Philosophy of Literature, or How Does Actual Reality Imitate Pure Possibilities?
The relationship between the literary imagination, literary possibilities, and actual reality poses a major philosophical problem in the field of the metaphysics of literature. This detailed analysis of some literary masterpieces, by Proust, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, demonstrates that actual reality actualizes or “imitates” literary pure possibilities. As such, these masterpieces should be treated not as romans a clef, but, instead, as paradigm-cases on whose basis we grasp and understand actual reality.
Amihud Gilead is a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Haifa, Israel. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Philosophy and Epistemology, having formerly served as Consulting Editor of the Journal of Value Inquiry. His research interests are metaphysics, philosophy of literature and science, early modern philosophy, Plato, and philosophical psychology. His publications include the books The Way of Spinoza’s Philosophy toward a Philosophical System (1986, in Hebrew); The Platonic Odyssey: A Philosophical-Literary Inquiry into the Phaedo (1994); Saving Possibilities: A Study in Philosophical Psychology (1999); Singularity and Other Possibilities: Panenmentalist Novelties (2003); Necessity and Truthful Fictions: Panenmentalist Observations (2009); and The Privacy of the Psychical (2011).
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