Download or read book A Different Order of Difficulty written by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the point of philosophy to transmit beliefs about the world, or can it sometimes have higher ambitions? In this bold study, Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé makes a critical contribution to the “resolute” program of Wittgenstein scholarship, revealing his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a complex, mock-theoretical puzzle designed to engage readers in the therapeutic self-clarification Wittgenstein saw as the true work of philosophy. Seen in this light, Wittgenstein resembles his modernist contemporaries more than might first appear. Like the literary innovators of his time, Wittgenstein believed in the productive power of difficulty, in varieties of spiritual experience, in the importance of age-old questions about life’s meaning, and in the possibility of transfigurative shifts toward the right way of seeing the world. In a series of absorbing chapters, Zumhagen-Yekplé shows how Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, and Coetzee set their readers on a path toward a new way of being. Offering a new perspective on Wittgenstein as philosophical modernist, and on the lives and afterlives of his indirect teaching, A Different Order of Difficulty is a compelling addition to studies in both literature and philosophy.
Download or read book Aesthetic Order written by Ruth Lorand and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetic Order challenges contemporary theories of aesthetics, offering the idea of beauty as quantitative yet different from the traditional discursive order. It will be of importance to all interested in aesthetic theory.
Download or read book The Order of Forms written by Anna Kornbluh and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity. Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.
Download or read book Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature written by Angus Charles Graham and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graham addresses several fundamental problems in classical Chinese philosophy, and in the nature and structure of the classical Chinese language. These inquiries and reflections are both broad based and detailed. Two sources of continuity bring these seemingly disparate parts into a coherent and intelligible whole. First, Graham addresses that set of fundamental philosophical questions that have been the focus of dispute in the tradition, and that have defined its character: What is the nature of human nature? What can we through linguistic and philosophical scrutiny discover about the date and composition of some of the major texts? What sense can we make of the Kung-sun Lung sophistries? A second source of coherence is Graham's identification and articulation of those basic and often unconscious presuppositions that ground our own tradition. By so doing, he enables readers to break free from the limits of their own conceptual universe and to explore in the Chinese experience a profoundly different world view.
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 160 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 A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature written by Garry L. Hagberg and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-02-16 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monumental collection of new and recent essays from an international team of eminent scholars represents the best contemporary critical thinking relating to both literary and philosophical studies of literature. Helpfully groups essays into the field's main sub-categories, among them ‘Relations Between Philosophy and Literature’, ‘Emotional Engagement and the Experience of Reading’, ‘Literature and the Moral Life’, and ‘Literary Language’ Offers a combination of analytical precision and literary richness Represents an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike, ideal for course use
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 After Philosophy written by Kenneth Baynes and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After Philosophy provides an excellent framework for understanding the most important strains of current philosophical work in North America, England, France, and Germany. The selections from the work of fourteen contemporary philosophers not only display the multiplicity of approaches being pursued since the breakup of any consensus on what philosophy is, but also help to clarify this proliferation of views and to spell out today's basic options for doing, or not doing, philosophy today. With a general introduction delineating what is in dispute between the different parties to the end-of-philosophy debates, brief introductions to the thought of each author, and suggestions for further reading following each selection, After Philosophy is ideally suited for use in any course that includes an overview of the bewildering variety of contemporary approaches to philosophy.The major sections and contributors are: I. The End of Philosophy. Richard Rorty Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida. II. The Transformation of Philosophy: Systematic Proposals. Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett, Hilary Putnam, Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas. III. The Transformation of Philosophy: Hermeneutics, Narrative, Rhetoric. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair Maclntyre, Hans Blumenberg, Charles Taylor.Kenneth Baynes is currently doing postgraduate research at the University of Frankfurt. James Bohman lectures in philosophy at Boston University, and Thomas McCarthy is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and the editor of the MIT Press series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.
Download or read book Philosophy and the Novel written by Alan H. Goldman and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-04-05 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan H. Goldman presents an original and lucid account of the relationship between philosophy and the novel. In the first part, on philosophy of novels, he defends theories of literary value and interpretation. Literary value, the value of literary works as such, is a species of aesthetic value. Goldman argues that works have aesthetic value when they simultaneously engage all our mental capacities: perceptual, cognitive, imaginative, and emotional. This view contrasts with now prevalent narrower formalist views of literary value. According to it, cognitive engagement with novels includes appreciation of their broad themes and the theses these imply, often moral and hence philosophical theses, which are therefore part of the novels' literary value. Interpretation explains elements of works so as to allow readers maximum appreciation, so as to maximize the literary value of the texts as written. Once more, Goldman's view contrasts with narrower views of literary interpretation, especially those which limit it to uncovering what authors intended. One implication of Goldman's broader view is the possibility of incompatible but equally acceptable interpretations, which he explores through a discussion of rival interpretations of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Goldman goes on to test the theory of value by explaining the immense appeal of good mystery novels in its terms. The second part of the book, on philosophy in novels, explores themes relating to moral agency—moral development, motivation, and disintegration—in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, John Irving's The Cider House Rules, and Joseph Conrad's Nostromo. By narrating the course of characters' lives, including their inner lives, over extended periods, these novels allow us to vicariously experience the characters' moral progressions, positive and negative, to learn in a more focused way moral truths, as we do from real life experiences.
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 Order of Things written by Michel Foucault and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-18 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When one defines "order" as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things, possibly one of the most significant, yet most overlooked, works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by his later work on power and discourse, nonetheless it was The Order of Things that established Foucault's reputation as an intellectual giant. Pirouetting around the outer edge of language, Foucault unsettles the surface of literary writing. In describing the limitations of our usual taxonomies, he opens the door onto a whole new system of thought, one ripe with what he calls "exotic charm". Intellectual pyrotechnics from the master of critical thinking, this book is crucial reading for those who wish to gain insight into that odd beast called Postmodernism, and a must for any fan of Foucault.
Download or read book Women Philosophy and Literature written by Dr Jane Duran and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New work on women thinkers often makes the point that philosophical conceptual thought is where we find it, examples such as Simone de Beauvoir and the nineteenth century Black American writer Anna Julia Cooper assure us that there is ample room for the development of philosophy in literary works but as yet there has been no single unifying attempt to trace such projects among a variety of women novelists. This book articulates philosophical concerns in the work of five well known twentieth century women writers, including writers of color. Duran traces the development of philosophical themes - ontological, ethical and feminist - in the writings of Margaret Drabble, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Cade Bambara and Elena Poniatowska presenting both a general overview of the author's work with an emphasis on traditional philosophical questions and a detailed feminist reading of the work.
Download or read book Chaos and Order written by N. Katherine Hayles and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-12-10 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scientific discovery that chaotic systems embody deep structures of order is one of such wide-ranging implications that it has attracted attention across a spectrum of disciplines, including the humanities. In this volume, fourteen theorists explore the significance for literary and cultural studies of the new paradigm of chaotics, forging connections between contemporary literature and the science of chaos. They examine how changing ideas of order and disorder enable new readings of scientific and literary texts, from Newton's Principia to Ruskin's autobiography, from Victorian serial fiction to Borges's short stories. N. Katherine Hayles traces shifts in meaning that chaos has undergone within the Western tradition, suggesting that the science of chaos articulates categories that cannot be assimilated into the traditional dichotomy of order and disorder. She and her contributors take the relation between order and disorder as a theme and develop its implications for understanding texts, metaphors, metafiction, audience response, and the process of interpretation itself. Their innovative and diverse work opens the interdisciplinary field of chaotics to literary inquiry.
Download or read book Turning Toward Philosophy written by Jill Gordon and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acknowledging the powerful impact that Plato's dialogues have had on readers, Jill Gordon shows how the literary techniques Plato used function philosophically to engage readers in doing philosophy and attracting them toward the philosophical life. The picture of philosophical activity emerging from the dialogues, as thus interpreted, is a complex process involving vision, insight, and emotion basic to the human condition rather than a resort to pure reason as an escape from it. Since the literary features of Plato's writing are what draw the reader into philosophy, the book becomes an argument for the union of philosophy and literature--and against their disciplinary bifurcation--in the dialogues. Gordon construes the relationship of Plato's text to its audience as an analogue of Socrates' relationship with his interlocutors in the dialogues, seeing both as fundamentally dialectic. On this insight she builds her detailed analysis of specific literary devices in chapters on dramatic form, character development, irony, and image-making (which includes myth, metaphor, and analogy). In this way Gordon views Plato as not at all the enemy of the poets and image-makers that previous interpreters have depicted. Rather, Gordon concludes that Plato understands the power of words and images quite well. Since they, and not logico-deductive argumentation, are the appropriate means for engaging human beings, he uses them to great effect and with a sensitive understanding of human psychology, wary of their possible corrupting influences but ultimately willing to harness their power for philosophical ends.
Download or read book Heroes and Philosophy written by David K. Johnson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-07-23 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first unauthorized look at the philosophy behind Heroes, one of TV's most popular shows When ordinary individuals from around the world inexplicably develop superhuman abilities, they question who they are, struggle to cope with new responsibilities, and decide whether to use their new power for good or for evil. Every episode of Tim Kring's hit TV show Heroes is a philosophical quandary. Heroes and Philosophy is the first book to analyze how philosophy makes this show so compelling. It lets you examine questions crucial to our existence as thinking, rational beings. Is the Company evil, or good? Does Hiro really have a destiny? Do we? Is it okay to lie in order to hide your powers or save the world? Heroes and Philosophy offers answers to these and other intriguing questions. Brings the insight of history's philosophical heavyweights such as Plato and Nietzche to Heroes characters and settings Adds a fun and fascinating dimension to your understanding of the show Expands your thinking about Heroes as the series expands from graphic and text novels to action figures and a video game Whether you're new to Heroes or have been a fan since day one, this book will take your enjoyment of the show to the next level.
Download or read book The Individual and the Political Order written by Norman E. Bowie and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1998 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in an accessible yet sophisticated style, The Individual and the Political Order, Third Edition is a text appropriate for students at all levels. This thoroughly revised edition challenges its readers to critically respond to a sustained defense of liberalism. Additions include examinations of communitarian and feminist critiques of liberalism, discussions of hate speech regulations, responses to the most recent work of Rawls, and a study of humanitarian intervention efforts in other countries. An expanded and updated bibliography as well as new study questions for each chapter make this an extremely useful text.
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.
