Offering a theory of imagination, and indirectly a defense of the humanities, this overly-rich and confusing work contains more literature than philosophy, and more philosophy than imagination. The author makes many suggestive comparisons: e.g., the literary equivalent of traditional positivism is the novels of Robbe-Grillet; the poetic equivalents of Peirce's firstness, secondness, and thirdness are the poems of Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, respectively. While Levi's division of the imagination into its teleological, dramatic, literary, (...) and metaphysical forms is well taken, he fails to heed Plato's warning to define the essence and not to be satisfied with a list of its kinds. The printing is careless.--A. B. (shrink)

Absolute devaluation : Friedrich Nietzsche -- Homelessness : Martin Heidegger -- Fatal positivities : Theodor Adorno -- The naive calculation of the negative : Maurice Blanchot -- Bad violence : Jacques Derrida -- The fracture : Giorgio Agamben -- Distortions, or, Nihilism against itself : Gianni Vattimo -- The denial of (Greek) thought : Alain Badiou.

This book moves toward building a new and more comprehensive theory of literature, philosophy, psychology, and art. The extremely popular work of Ken Wilber, unites the best of both western and eastern thought and affirms that the stages of consciousness, more refined than that of the reasoning mind, do exist.

This is a reply to Dan Clouser's philosophical commentary on the essays in this issue. Important assumptions that condition his perspective on the essays are identified and analyzed. Attention is drawn to his unhistorical emphasis on the exclusive importance of philosophy in ethical thought, and his resulting insistence that any discipline wishing to contribute to biomedical discourse must adopt the assumptions and methodologies of philosophy. Clouser's “three tenets” are examined, and then the question of what literature, considered (...) in terms of its own aims and methodologies, has to offer to medical ethics. Genuine dialogue about medical ethics between philosophers and literary scholars is both desirable and important, but becomes possible only if the methods and insights of each discipline are honored in the pursuit of the overall goals they hold in common. (shrink)

The essays in this collection fall into three groups: the first dealing with phenomenological methods and discussions, the second with applications in the field of literature, the third with applications in the social sciences. The quality and seriousness of the essays is quite uneven. The essays in the first group fail to go beyond a fairly uncritical reading of Husserl, especially in treating the reduction of the natural viewpoint. The crucial failures there effect the second and third sections. Especially (...) in the analyses of literature, the neglect of the context of meanings leads to questionable generalizations. Natanson's frequent criticisms of Sartre's rejection of the transcendental ego suffer from incomplete statement of Sartre's arguments. One wishes that Natanson had prepared a substantial statement of this discussion for the collection, rather than allow scattered brief remarks in several papers to stand alone. Elsewhere as well, brief suggestive passages could have profited from a thorough rewriting.—W. G. E. (shrink)

Is it possible for postmodernism to offer viable, coherent accounts of ethics? Or are our social and intellectual worlds too fragmented for any broad consensus about the moral life? These issues have emerged as some of the most contentious in literary and philosophical studies. In Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory a distinguished international gathering of philosophers and literary scholars address the reconceptualisations involved in this 'turn towards ethics'. An important feature of this has been a renewed (...) interest in the literary text as a focus for the exploration of ethical issues. Exponents of this trend include Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, the latter a contributor and a key figure in this volume. This book assesses the significance of this development for ethical and literary theory and attempts to articulate an alternative postmodern account of ethics which does not rely on earlier appeals to universal truths. (shrink)

In this essay, I explore the ways that Beauvoir’s description of philosophical novels reveals her understanding of consciousness as a particular sort of ambiguity: that which not only gives the world meaning, but which also, necessarily, finds meaning in the world through the values, ideas, and objects given to it by others. It is through the philosophical (metaphysical) novel that Beauvoir finds a medium for the philosophical communication of ambiguity – that is, a medium for writing human being. More specifically, (...) I consider the metaphysical stance Beauvoir is able to describe because of her commitment to philosophical literature. In writing, and in reading, fiction, what is manifest is both found and given, discovered and created; and the metaphysics of the novel offers a way to read philosophy as poeisis, poetry in the sense of bringing-forth or revealing worldly meaning, in ways that are ambiguously particular and universal. (shrink)

Beyond the Ancient Quarrel brings together contributions from leading scholars to explore the boundaries between literature, philosophy, and literary criticism in the work of J.M. Coetzee.

Applying ideas drawn from contemporary critical theory, this book historicizes psychoanalysis through a new and significant theorization of the Gothic. The central premise is that the nineteenth-century Gothic produced a radical critique of accounts of sublimity and Freudian psychoanalysis. This book makes a major contribution to an understanding of both the nineteenth century and the Gothic discourse which challenged the dominant ideas of that period. Writers explored include Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker.

This is an original reading of Mikhail Bakhtin in the context of Western philosophical traditions and counter-traditions. The book portrays Bakhtin as a Modernist thinker torn between an ideological secularity and a profound religious sensibility, invariably concerned with questions of ethics and impelled to turn from philosophy to literature as another way of knowing. Most major studies of Bakhtin highlight the fragmented and apparently discontinuous nature of his work. Erdinast-Vulcan emphasizes, instead, the underlying coherence of the Bakhtinian project, (...) reading its inherent ambivalences as an intersection of philosophical, literary, and psychological insights into the dynamics of embodied subjectivity. Bakhtin's turn to literature and poetry, as well as the dissatisfactions that motivated it, align him with three other "exilic" Continental philosophers who were his contemporaries: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Adopting Bakhtin's own open-ended approach to the human sciences, the book stages a series of philosophical encounters between these thinkers, highlighting their respective itineraries and impasses, and generating a Bakhtinian synergy of ideas. (shrink)

A recent focus of Philip Kitcher’s research has been, somewhat surprisingly in the light of his earlier work, the philosophical analyses of literary works and operas. Some may see a discontinuity in Kitcher’s oeuvre in this respect – it may be difficult to see how his earlier contributions to philosophy of science relate to this much less mainstream approach to philosophy. The aim of this paper is to show that there is no such discontinuity: Kitcher’s contributions to the (...) philosophy of science and his more recent endeavors into the philosophy of literature and of music are grounded in the same big picture attitude towards the human mind – an attitude that he would undoubtedly call ‘pragmatic’: one that emphasizes the importance of those mental processes that are not (or not entirely) rational. (shrink)

Papers presented at National Seminar on Jainism held in 1998 at Hyderabad?

This Publication Contains The Papers Presented At The Seminar, Contribution Of Andhra Desa To Buddhism Organized By Birla Archaological And Cultural Research Institute, Hyderabad A Few Years Ago. The Purpose Of The Seminar Is To Bring To Light The New Discoveries And Throw Further Light On The Already Existing Information On Buddhism From Andhra Desa In Particular And India In General. Research Is A Never Ending Process And Results Of Research Will Always Be Wither Finding Out Something New Or Updating (...) The Existing Information With The New Discoveries. (shrink)

... he writes of the destruction of Mnemosyne's city and of the severing of the locks of the goddess herself: From her also, when God put off his cloak, ...

‘We are before Dante’: In this interview, held via email in March 2020 amid the massive outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jean-Luc Nancy leads us on a brief but far-reaching foray through his thought. He succeeds in providing an overview of the subjects that he has raised since the beginning of his career as a philosopher, while maintaining a focus on their pertinence for what we are currently facing in the world today. He supplements his insight that ‘we are before (...) Dante’ with the equally remarkable conclusion: ‘Desire is what is born par excellence’. In between these two propositions, and in between the lines and words documented here – touching upon topics as diverse as the moai statues of Easter Island, the music of Schumann, Wagner, and techno, as well as the writing of Artaud, Proust, and Verlaine – we find an exciting, up-to-date treatment of the question of how to ‘deal with the world intellectually’ without, in doing so, participating in the modern claim to ‘master’ it. Instead, Nancy suggests, we ought to be attentive to what escapes us by its very principle, with philosophy, literature, and art serving as witnesses of what has always been absent from our mind, that is, the sensibility of meaning, in order to become aware that, since we are always already before and after birth, ‘we come from nowhere and everywhere’. This realization enables us to understand the political consequences that it has for our understanding of a world in metamorphosis, including for highly controversial issues such as colonialism, anti-Semitism, the far right, neo-liberalism, and other totalitarian forms that supposedly manifest a return of the myth, as well as its consequences for the insurmountability of Marx. (shrink)

_The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature_ is an in-depth examination of literature through a philosophical lens, written by distinguished figures across the major divisions of philosophy. Its 40 newly-commissioned essays are divided into six sections: historical foundations what is literature? aesthetics & appreciation meaning & interpretation metaphysics & epistemology ethics & political theory _The Companion_ opens with a comprehensive historical overview of the philosophy of literature, including chapters on the study’s ancient origins up (...) to the 18 th -20 th centuries. The second part defines literature and its different categories. The third part covers the aesthetics of literature. The fourth and fifth sections discuss the meaning and consequences of philosophical interpretation of literature, as well as epistemological and metaphysical issues such as literary cognitivism and imaginative resistance. The sixth section contextualizes the place of philosophy of literature in the "real world" with essays on topics such as morality, politics, race and gender. Fully indexed, with helpful further reading sections at the end of each chapter, this Companion is an ideal starting point for those coming to philosophy of literature for the first time as well as a valuable reference for readers more familiar with the subject. (shrink)

By exploring central issues in the philosophy of literature, illustrated by a wide range of novels, poems, and plays, _Philosophy of Literature_ gets to the heart of why literature matters to us and sheds new light on the nature and interpretation of literary works. Provides a comprehensive study, along with original insights, into the philosophy of literature Develops a unique point of view - from one of the field's leading exponents Offers examples of key issues (...) using excerpts from well-known novels, poems, and plays from different historical periods. (shrink)

_'Jean-Jacques Lecercle's remarkable _Philosophy of Nonsense___ offers a sustained and important account of an area that is usually hastily dismissed. Using the resources of contemporary philosophy - notably Deleuze and Lyotard - he manages to bring out the importance of nonsense'_ - _Andrew Benjamin, University of Warwick_ Why are we, and in particular why are philosophers and linguists, so fascinated with nonsense? Why do Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear appear in so many otherwise dull and dry academic books? This (...) amusing, yet rigorous new book by Jean-Jacques Lecercle shows how the genre of nonsense was constructed and why it has proved so enduring and enlightening for linguistics and philosophy. (shrink)

This book seeks to join the ongoing, interdisciplinary approach to children’s literature by means of sustained readings of individual texts by means of important works in the history of philosophy. Its inclusion of authors from both various departments—philosophy, literature, religion, and education—and various countries is an attempt to show how traditional boundaries between disciplines might become more permeable and how philosophy offers important insights to this interdisciplinary, critical conversation.

In this provocative new examination of the philosophical, moral and religious significance of literature, Michael Weston explores the role of literature in both analytic and continental traditions. He initiates a dialogue between them and investigates the growing importance of these issues for major contemporary thinkers. Each chapter explores a philosopher or literary figure who has written on the relation between literature and the good life, such as Derrida, Kierkegaard, Murdoch and Blanchot. Challenging and insightful, Philosophy, (...) class='Hi'>Literature and the Human Good is ideal for all students of philosophy and literature. (shrink)

Essential readings in the philosophy of literature are brought together for the first time in this anthology. Contains forty-five substantial and carefully chosen essays and extracts Provides a balanced and coherent overview of developments in the field during the past thirty years, including influential work on fiction, interpretation, metaphor, literary value, and the definition and ontology of literature Includes an additional historical section featuring generous selections of the writings of early pioneers such as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and (...) Hume Serves as an ideal introduction to the philosophy of literature or the philosophy of art, as well as a handy compilation of contributions to the field by its leading figures. (shrink)

This book seeks to join the ongoing, interdisciplinary approach to children’s literature by means of sustained readings of individual texts by means of important works in the history of philosophy. Its inclusion of authors from both various departments—philosophy, literature, religion, and education—and various countries is an attempt to show how traditional boundaries between disciplines might become more permeable and how philosophy offers important insights to this interdisciplinary, critical conversation.

The recent focus of Philip Kitcher’s research has been, somewhat surprisingly in the light of his earlier work, the philosophical analyses of literary works and operas. The aim of this paper is to show that there is no discontinuity between this new direction and Kitcher's earlier work in the philosophy of science: Kitcher’s contributions to the philosophy of science and his more recent endeavors into the philosophy of literature and of music are grounded in the same (...) big picture attitude towards the human mind – and attitude that he would undoubtedly call ‘pragmatic’: one that emphasizes the importance of those mental processes that are not rational. (shrink)

Hans-Georg Gadamer, the major proponent of philosophical hermeneutics, reveals himself here as a highly sensitive reader and critic of the German literary tradition. This is not the work of a specialist as narrowly defined in the typical literary study. Although he is a master of the techniques of criticism, Gadamer always sees the study of literature as a fundamentally human activity where human beings, generation after generation, pose their questions to an encroaching darkness that threatens to rob them of (...) their confidence in the meaning of life and death. Never pedantic or antiquarian, these studies show such literary giants of the German past as Goethe and Hölderlin as our contemporaries. Gadamer demonstrates his ability to achieve the creative interplay of literature and philosophy which, in isolation, easily degenerate into sterile academic games. Typical of this dialogue are essays on Rainer Maria Rilke, including an examination of a problem of punctuation in one of his poems. What would be, in less capable hands, one more solution to a literary problem, turns out to be one of Gadamer’s creative approaches to the mystery of man’s relation to time and death. (shrink)

This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy.

This book moves toward building a new and more comprehensive theory of literature, philosophy, psychology, and art. The extremely popular work of Ken Wilber, unites the best of both western and eastern thought and affirms that the stages of consciousness, more refined than that of the reasoning mind, do exist.

Figuring Animals is a collection of fifteen essays concerning the representation of animals in literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and cultural practice. At the turn of the new century, it is helpful to reconsider our inherited understandings of the species, some of which are still useful to us. It is also important to look ahead to new understandings and new dialogue, which may contribute to the survival of us all. The contributors to this volume participate in this dialogue (...) in a variety of ways--through personal experience, natural history, cultural studies, philosophical inquiry, art history, literary analysis, film studies, and theoretical imagining, and through a combination of these trains of thought. The essays expose weaknesses in western epistemological frames of reference that for centuries have limited our views and, thus, our experiences of animal being, including our own. (shrink)

In Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Lived Experience, Eleanore Holveck presents Simone de Beauvoir's theory of literature and metaphysics, including its relationship to the philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, with references to the literary tradition of Goethe, Maurice Barr_s, Arthur Rimbaud, AndrZ Breton, and Paul Nizan. The book provides a detailed philosophical analysis of Beauvoir's early short stories and several major novels, including The Mandarins and L'invitZe.

Pandey, V. Introduction.--Kalelkar, K. S. Jainism, a familyhood of all religions.--David, M. D. From Risabha to Mahavira.--Chalil, J. E. Glimpses of Southern Jainism.--Gopani, A. S. Life and culture in Jaina narrative literature, 8th, 9th and 10th century A.D.--Gopani, A. S. Position of women in Jaina literature.--Ranka, R. Evolution of Jaina thought.--Pandey, V. Jaina philosophy and religion.--Shah, C. C. Jainism and modern life.--Sankalia, H. D. The great renunciation.--Shah, U. P. Jaina contribution to Indian art.--Gorakshkar, S. Early metal images (...) of the Jainas.--Bhagwati, U. Bibliographical aids for the study of Jainism. (shrink)