Download or read book The Philosophy of Literature written by Peter Lamarque and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-08-11 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book The Philosophy of Literature written by Peter Lamarque and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2008-08-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book The Philosophy of Literature written by Donald Phillip Verene and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-09-12 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies puts forth the question of the extent to which philosophers must go to school with the poets. It begins with a new interpretation of the famous Platonic quarrel with the poetic wisdom of Homer. It brings this question forward through the humanism of thinkers of the Italian Renaissance and the German Idealism of Hegel. It then treats the relation of philosophy and literature in four ways by considering philosophy as literature, philosophy of literature, philosophy in literature, and philosophy and literature. In regard to the first of these, it discusses Jorge Luis Borges’s The Immortal, to the second James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, to the third Carl Sandburg’s epic prose poem The People, Yes, and to the fourth, Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools. This work demonstrates that in an area of thought often dominated by fashionable doctrines of literary interpretation, the great works of literature and philosophy remain as permanent residents of our thought and imagination.

Download or read book Philosophy in Children s Literature written by Peter R. Costello and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book allows philosophers, literary theorists, and education specialists to come together to offer a series of readings on works of children's literature. Each of their readings is focused on pairing a particular, popular picture book or a chapter book with philosophical texts or themes. The book has three sections--the first, on picturebooks; the second, on chapter books; and the third, on two sets of paired readings of two very popular picturebooks. By means of its three sections, the book sets forth as its goal to show how philosophy can be helpful in reappraising books aimed at children from early childhood on. Particularly in the third section, the book emphasizes how philosophy can help to multiply the type of interpretative stances that are possible when readers listen again to what they thought they knew so well. The kinds of questions this book raises are the following: How are children's books already anticipating or articulating philosophical problems and discussions? How does children's literature work by means of philosophical puzzles or language games? What do children's books reveal about the existential situation the child reader faces? In posing and answering these kinds of questions, the readings within the book thus intersect with recent, developing scholarship in children's literature studies as well as in the psychology and philosophy of childhood.

Download or read book Meaning and Use written by A. Margalit and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-11-14 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter was held in Jerusalem on April 25-28, 1976. The symposium was originally planned to celebrate the 60th birthday of Y ehoshua Bar-Hillel, philosopher and friend. But his sudden death intervened, and turned celebration into commemoration. The topic of the symposiumwas Meaning and Use. For Bar-Hillel, the question 'meaning or use?' was of great importance, one which he took as a question of priorities. Which approach to natural language is prior: the formal, semantical approach, which accords a central position to the truth functional concept of meaning and to the theory of reference, or rather the alternative approach which accords the central position to linguistic commu nication and prefers dealing with speech acts to dealing with Statements? Bar Hillel's answer to this question, in his later years, can be summed up by our title, meaning and use: neither approach deserves priority, each is equally necessary, and they both complement each other. Those familiar with Bar Hillel's uncompromising intellectual honesty would know that this answer does not reflect a superficial wish for domestic peace, but stems rather from deep and informed convictions. The issues of meaning and use dominated Bar-Hillel's intellectuallife. At the same time his day-to-day existence was guided by the idea that the meaning of life is to be found in being useful, particularly in being useful to the community of seekers of knowledge.

Download or read book Buddhist Literature as Philosophy Buddhist Philosophy as Literature written by Rafal K. Stepien and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can literature reveal reality? Is philosophical truth a literary artifice? How does the way we think affect what we can know? Buddhism has been grappling with these questions for centuries, and this book attempts to answer them by exploring the relationship between literature and philosophy across the classical and contemporary Buddhist worlds of India, Tibet, China, Japan, Korea, and North America. Written by leading scholars, the book examines literary texts composed over two millennia, ranging in form from lyric verse, narrative poetry, panegyric, hymn, and koan, to novel, hagiography, (secret) autobiography, autofiction, treatise, and sutra, all in sustained conversation with topics in metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophies of mind, language, literature, and religion. Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, this book deliberately works across and against the boundaries separating three mainstays of humanistic pursuit—literature, philosophy, and religion—by focusing on the multiple relationships at play between content and form in works drawn from a truly diverse range of philosophical schools, literary genres, religious cultures, and historical eras. Overall, the book calls into question the very ways in which we do philosophy, study literature, and think about religious texts. It shows that Buddhist thought provides sophisticated responses to some of the perennial problems regarding how we find, create, and apply meaning—on the page, in the mind, and throughout our lives.

Download or read book The Philosophy of Poetry written by John Gibson and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years philosophers have produced important books on nearly all the major arts: the novel and painting, music and theatre, dance and architecture, conceptual art and even gardening. Poetry is the sole exception. This is an astonishing omission, one this collection of original essays will correct. If contemporary philosophy still regards metaphors such as 'Juliet is the sun' as a serious problem, one has an acute sense of how prepared it is to make philosophical and aesthetic sense of poems such W. B. Yeats's 'The Second Coming', Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy', or Paul Celan's 'Todesfuge'. The Philosophy of Poetry brings together philosophers of art, language, and mind to expose and address the array of problems poetry raises for philosophy. In doing so it lays the foundation for a proper philosophy of poetry, setting out the various puzzles and paradoxes that future work in the field will have to address. Given its breadth of approach, the volume is relevant not only to aesthetics but to all areas of philosophy concerned with meaning, truth, and the communicative and expressive powers of language more generally. Poetry is the last unexplored frontier in contemporary analytic aesthetics, and this volume offers a powerful demonstration of how central poetry should be to philosophy.

Download or read book Philosophy and Literature written by Ole Martin Skilleås and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The main aspects of the field of philosophy and literature are outlined, and we see the reasons why Plato divided philosophy and literature and banished literature from his ideal state, and how Aristotle answered Plato's criticism of literature. The philosophical characteristic of wanting to define phenomena takes us into different ways of defining literature. This book also investigates the nature of interpretation and its sources of authority, how literary forms can be read as vehicles for the development of philosophical problems, and how different philosophical forms can be analysed as using typically literary means in order to persuade readers. The question of whether it is warranted or useful to maintain the distinction between philosophy and literature is addressed."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature written by Noël Carroll and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 18th-20th 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.

Download or read book Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Literature written by David Davies and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2008-03-06 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What, if anything, distinguishes works of fiction such as Hamlet and Madame Bovary from biographies, news reports, or office bulletins? Is there a “right” way to interpret fiction? Should we link interpretation to the author’s intention? Ought our moral unease with works that betray sadistic, sexist, or racist elements lower our judgments of their aesthetic worth? And what, when it comes down to it, is literature? The readings in this collection bring together some of the most important recent work in the philosophy of literature by philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, John Searle, and David Lewis. The readings explore philosophical issues such as the nature of fiction, the status of the author, the act of interpretation, the role of the emotions in the act of reading, the aesthetic and moral value of literary works, and other topics central to the philosophy of literature.

Download or read book Finding a Replacement for the Soul written by Brett Bourbon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaching the study of literature as a unique form of the philosophy of language and mind--as a study of how we produce nonsense and imagine it as sense--this is a book about our human ways of making and losing meaning. Brett Bourbon asserts that our complex and variable relation with language defines a domain of meaning and being that is misconstrued and missed in philosophy, in literary studies, and in our ordinary understanding of what we are and how things make sense. Accordingly, his book seeks to demonstrate how the study of literature gives us the means to understand this relationship. The book itself is framed by the literary and philosophical challenges presented by Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. With reference to these books and the problems of interpretation and meaning that they pose, Bourbon makes a case for the fundamental philosophical character of the study of literature, and for its dependence on theories of meaning disguised as theories of mind. Within this context, he provides original accounts of what sentences, fictions, non-fictions, and poems are; produces a new account of the logical form of fiction and of the limits of interpretation that follow from it; and delineates a new and fruitful domain of inquiry in which literature, philosophy, and science intersect. Table of Contents: Preface Note on Abbreviations Introduction: What Are We When We Are Not? Part I The Surface of Language and the Absence of Meaning 1. From Soul-Making to Person-Making 2. The Logical Form of Fiction 3. The Emptiness of Literary Interpretation 4. To Be But Not To Mean 5. How Do Oracles Mean? Part II Senses and Nonsenses: Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations 6. A Twitterlitter of Nonsense: Askesis at Finnegans Wake 7. The Analogy between Persons and Words 8. "The Human Body Is the Best Picture of the Human Soul" 9. The Senses of Time 10. Being Something and Meaning Something Bibliography Acknowledgments Index This is an adventurous and unusual book. Bourbon moves back and forth between literary and philosophical contexts with ease, showing in multifarious ways how the one can, often in unexpected ways, illuminate the other. Throughout these wide-ranging explorations Bourbon uncovers a good deal about both the nature of literary meaning and our distinctive -- if tellingly irreducible -- relations to literary texts. --Garry L. Hagberg, author of Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory and Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge

Download or read book Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue written by Hans-Georg Gadamer and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1993-11-18 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Philosophy Literature and the Human Good written by Michael Weston and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, Literature and the Human Good is ideal for all students of philosophy and literature.

Download or read book Philosophy of Literature written by Christopher New and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-04 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature, like the visual arts, poses its own philosophical problems. While literary theorists have discussed the nature of literature intensively, analytic philosophers have usually dealt with literary problems either within the general framework of aesthetics or else in a way that is accessible only to a philosophical audience. The present book is unique in that it introduces the philosophy of literature from an analytic perspective accessible to both students of literature and students of philosophy. Specifically, the book addresses: the definition of literature, the distinction between oral and written literature and the identity of literary works the nature of fiction and our emotional involvement with fictional characters the concept of imagination and its role in the apprehension of literary works theories of metaphor and postmodernist theory on the significance of the authors' intentions to the interpretationof their work an examination of the relevance of thruth and morality to literary appreciation Lucid and well organised and free from jargon, hilosophy of Literature: An Introduction offers fresh approaches to traditional problems and raises new issues in the philosophy of literature.

Download or read book On Literature and Philosophy written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Gingko Library. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most important writers in contemporary Arabic literature. Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1988 (the only Arab writer to win the prize thus far), his novels helped bring Arabic literature onto the international stage. Far fewer people know his nonfiction works, however—a gap that this book fills. Bringing together Mahfouz’s early nonfiction writings (most penned during the 1930s) which have not previously been available in English, this volume offers a rare glimpse into the early development of the renowned author. As these pieces show, Mahfouz was deeply interested in literature and philosophy, and his early writings engage with the origins of philosophy, its development and place in the history of thought, as well its meaning writ large. In his literary essays, he discusses a wide range of authors, from Anton Chekov to his own Arab contemporaries like Taha Hussein. He also ventures into a host of important contemporary issues, including science and modernity, the growing movement for women’s rights in the Arab world, and emerging ideologies like socialism—all of which outline the growing challenges to traditional modes of living that we saw all around him. Together, these essays offer a fascinating window not just into the mind of Mahfouz himself but the changing landscape of Egypt during that time, from the development of Islam to the struggles between tradition, modernity, and the influences of the West.

Download or read book Silence in Philosophy Literature and Art written by Steven Bindeman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silence exists at the edge of the world, where words break off and meaning fades into ambiguity. The numerous treatments of silence in Steven L. Bindeman’s Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art question the misleading clarity of certainty, which persists in the unreflective discourse of common experience. Significant philosophical problems, such as the limits of language, the perception of sound and the construction of meaning, the dynamics of the social realm, and the nature of the human self, all appear differently as a consequence of this questioning. Silence is shown to have two modes, disruptive and healing, which work together as complementary stages within a creative process. The interaction between these two modes of silence serves as the dynamic behind the entire work.

Download or read book Literature Against Philosophy Plato to Derrida written by Mark Edmundson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely book argues that the institutionalisation of literary theory, particularly within American and British academic circles, has led to a sterility of thought which ignores the special character of literary art. Mark Edmundson traces the origins of this tendency to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, in which Plato took the side of philosophy; and he shows how the work of modern theorists - Foucault, Derrida, de Man and Bloom - exhibits similar drives to subsume poetic art into some 'higher' kind of thought. Challenging and controversial, this book should be read by all teachers of literature and of theory, and by anyone concerned about the future of institutionalised literary studies.