Literature and Philosophical Progress

Metodo 1 (6):17-40 (2018)
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Abstract

This paper addresses the question of how literary and philosophical thinking can converge in experience of a literary work. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, in Truth, Fiction, and Literature, dispute this possibility. I respond to their view with particular attention to their account of thematic interpretation. Thematic interpretation is presented here as involving thought about the reasons behind a work’s use of its content and other features. Those reasons have an implicit generality that allows us to move from literary specificity to general, philosophically significant understanding. Philosophy’s need for the kind of thinking supported by literature, exploring patterns, priorities and less than universal claims, is defended. George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch and Lydia Davis’s story ‘Ethics’ provide illustrations of the issues.

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Eileen John
University of Warwick

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