Abstract

Imagine a reader expert in the scholarship on To the Lighthouse and yet ignorant of the novel itself. What would such a person, when finally sitting down to read it for the first time, know—or think they know—about its relationship to philosophy? Based solely on the reams of articles, book chapters, and monographs that place the novel in dialogue with one or more philosophers, the first-time reader of To the Lighthouse would predict with confidence and precision which thinkers are most overtly relevant to the text. "Without question," he or she might say, "the three primary candidates, based on the frequency and depth with which Woolf scholars have treated them, are the English analytic philosophers G. E. Moore and...