Abstract

At first glance, this volume may seem to have little to offer of philosophic interest. It is a collection of papers and responses from a conference on seventeenth-century French literature, with a focus on the Art Poétique of Boileau. Topics and discussions are very much in the mode of literary scholarship since the Second World War, but the more recent "structuralist" or "semiotic" trends are absent, except for a bare allusion here and there. Nevertheless, no French literary scholar is ignorant of philosophic implications, just as no French philosopher is ignorant of matters of style. For that reason the volume suggests questions that go beyond the specialized talk of literary scholars re-examining the import of the French classical writers.