Philosophy As A Literary Art

Philosophy and literature enjoy a close, complex relationship. Elucidating the connections between these two fields, this book examines the ways philosophy deploys literary means to advance its practice, particularly as a way of life that extends beyond literary forms and words into physical deeds, nonlinguistic expression, and subjective moods and feelings. Exploring thinkers from Socrates and Confucius to Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir, Richard Shusterman probes the question of what roles literature could play in a vision of philosophy as something essentially lived rather than merely written. To develop this vision of philosophy that incorporates literature but seeks to go beyond the verbal to realize the embodied fullness of life and capture its inexpressible dimensions, Shusterman gives particular attention to authors who straddle the literature/philosophical divide: from Augustine and Montaigne through Wordsworth and Kierkegaard to T.S. Eliot, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Bertrand Russell. The book concludes with a chapter on the Chinese art of writing with its mixture of poetry, calligraphy, and painting. Philosophy and the Art of Writing should interest students and researchers in literary theory and philosophy. It also opens the practice of philosophy to people who are not professionals in the writing of philosophy or literary theory.

This book proposes a consideration of philosophy from a literary point of view. It examines some of the literary and rhetorical devices philosophers use in their work, whether deliberately or nor. This book was originally published as a special issue of The European Legacy.

Despite philosophers’ growing interest in the relation between philosophy and literature in general, over the last few decades comparatively few studies have been published dealing more narrowly with the literary aspects of philosophical texts. The relationship between philosophy and literature is too often taken to be "literature as philosophy" and very rarely "philosophy as literature." It is the dissatisfaction with this one-sidedness that lies at the heart of the present volume. Philosophy has nothing to lose by engaging in a serious process of literary self-analysis. On the contrary, such an exercise would most likely make it stronger, more sophisticated, more playful and especially more self-reflexive. By not moving in this direction, philosophy places itself in the position of not following what has been deemed, since Socrates at least, the worthiest of all philosophical ideals: self-knowledge. This book was originally published as a special issue of The European Legacy.

Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art demonstrates how silence as a form of indirect discourse provides us with access to hitherto inaccessible aspects of human experience.

There is a fundamental relationship between philosophy and literature in their attempt to interpret and reflect reality. Both philosophy and literature are arts or at least aspects of art. Aesthetics otherwise known as the philosophy of art exposes very clearly the link between philosophy and literature. On the other hand, through its major genres namely, drama, prose, and poetry, the link between literature and philosophy is made bare. Moreover, philosophy in playing its second-order role, delves into the literary world or the discipline of literature with its philosophical paraphernalia of criticality, reflectivity, analyticity, and rigour among others, to investigate activities of literary professionals, especially as they relate to interpretation and understanding of the nature of the reality of human existential experience. It is, on the basis of this that this book proposes and exposes the relationship between philosophy and the literary arts. This it does by using aesthetics as an aspect of philosophy to elucidate the nature and function of philosophy in literary art as well as their relationship with each other. It also uses drama, poetry, and prose as genres of literature to enunciate the nature and function of literary art. The argument here is that both philosophical al aesthetics and literature (drama, poetry, and prose) are geared toward interpretation and reflection of a people’s worldview, man’s existential experience, the nature of human society, and by extension the nature of reality in general. Thus, to succeed in its avowed aim; the book is divided into seven (7) chapters. The first and second chapters clarify the meaning of philosophy, literature, and philosophy of literature. The third and fourth chapters are concerned with aesthetics as philosophy of art, the nature of art where prose, drama, and poetry are examined as literary arts. The fifth chapter examines the role of philosophy and literary arts in understanding reality. The sixth chapter examines the nature and role of intention and analogy in the arts. The last chapter is a conclusion of all that has been discussed. The motivation for compiling this book is to fill the obvious gap found in textbooks on Aesthetics or Philosophy of arts. No textbook written on this subject has dealt with the relationship between aesthetics and literary art and the role of literature and aesthetics in understanding and interpreting reality. It is my sincere hope, that this book will not only fill this gap but also serve as useful material for students and lecturers of the philosophy of literature and philosophy of art. (aesthetics).

This is the first collection of essays focused on the many-faceted work of Kendall L. Walton. Walton has shaped debate about the arts for the last 50 years. He provides a comprehensive framework for understanding arts in terms of the human capacity of make-believe that shows how different arts – visual, photographic, musical, literary, or poetic – can be explained in terms of complex structures of pretense, perception, imagining, empathy, and emotion. His groundbreaking work has been taken beyond aesthetics to address foundational issues concerning linguistic and scientific representations – for example, about the nature of scientific modelling or to explain how much of what we say is quite different from the literal meanings of our words. Contributions from a diverse group of philosophers probe Walton’s detailed proposals and the themes for research they open. The essays provide an overview of important debates that have Walton’s work at their core. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working on aesthetics across the humanities, as well as those interested in the topic of representation and its intersection with perception, language, science, and metaphysics.