literature
TagThe Various Literary Forms of Philosophy (guest post)
“What are the literary forms philosophy can come in? Judging by contemporary works it seems the best way to express our ideas is in 8000-word journal articles, monographs, the occasional op-ed. But there are so many literary forms to do philosophy in.” (more…)
Appiah Named Next President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and law at New York University, has been elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (more…)
Unextractable Insights of Literature and the Arts
“There appears to be no room within ethics for humanistic thinking or artistic expression as such, and this represents a massive and practically catastrophic contraction of ethics.” (more…)
Philosophy and “The Empirically Tractable”
I think you are right to be suspicious of the tendency of this institutional paradigm to postulate truths that are ‘basic’, ‘ultimate’ or ‘fundamental’ just at the point where things begin to look interesting or problematic from the point of view of those we in the profession pretentiously refer to as ‘non-philosophers’. (more…)
A Flowchart of Philosophical Novels and Stories
Ben Roth, a philosopher who teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program, has put together a kind of flowchart recommending philosophical novels and stories. (more…)
A Way Philosophy Differs from the Other Humanities, or a Caricature of the Humanities?
Professors of the humanities make judgments about value. Art historians, literary scholars, musicologists, and classicists say to our students: These works are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange, insightful. They are more worth your time and attention than others… Yet such judgment violates the principle of equality. So humanists have to pretend we’re not do..
Philosopher Selected to be Member of the Swedish Academy
Åsa Wikforss, professor of philosophy at the Stockholm University, has been chosen as the newest member of the Swedish Academy, an “independent cultural institution, founded in 1786 by King Gustaf III in order to advance the Swedish language and Swedish literature” that is responsible for awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature. (more…)
Poetry and Philosophical Thinking
I still hold that there is an important and significant role for traditional forms of philosophy but the question remains, is there something more to philosophical thinking that we can access through engagement with poetry which is filled with rich images, emotional sensitivity and attention to language? (more…)
How Philosophers See The Arts And The Rest Of The Humanities
I can only speak for myself, but being trained by a philosopher, I often feel I was exposed to an expectation of argumentative rigor that, to be perfectly frank, I can’t say I always find in the field of political theory proper. But this can result in drawbacks. Philosophers sometimes look at the rest of the humanities in the way that social scientists look at socia..
Philosophers On Bob Dylan’s Words, Ideas, and His Nobel Prize Win
Yesterday, Bob Dylan was selected as the 2016 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Dylan is the first musician to win the award, and there has been controversy over the boundary redefining move, as well as reflection on the significance of his work. (more…)
Philosophy’s Exclusion of Literary Writings
Chiara Bottici (New School) was one of the opening speakers at the Night of Philosophy held at the French Embassy in New York City on April 24th, 2015. She chose a controversial figure to focus on—Machiavelli, whose “very status as a philosopher is contested”—in order to get at the question of what does and what does not count as philosophy.
Towards the end o..