Pre-Modern Philosophical Views on Reality and Truth in Literature (original) (raw)

Vormoderne philosophische Auffassungen zur Realität und Wahrheit in der Literatur

2013

The views of the writers outlined and examined here show that a philosophical approach is unavoidably in a contrasting position in relation to literary ways of representing reality and truth in literature. The specific domain of philosophical reflection is to clarify concepts through deductive methods or a purely rational viewpoint, whereas literature is based on the experience of life stories in concrete circumstances. The prospect of our dealing with sacred and secular literary texts is to disclose literary ways of observing and expressing reality and truth in its most elementary form of life. In all times we can observe the need to convey sense-experience and to evoke ethical reflection by using a more suitable mode of expression with an eye to the larger structures of literary representation of reality and truth. Literature deals with representation of life in all its contrasting manifestations in persuasive literary forms and is therefore intrinsically connected with the issues...

Literature in the Light of Philosophy

In the literary tradition covering more than two and a half thousand years, philosophy has been frequently mentioned in close proximity to literature, often as different ways of engaging more or less the same activity. We shall look at this matter briefly in the paper. What is not often said, even though many would probably not object to the idea is that literary criticism is a philosophical, rather than a scientific discipline, insofar as it is exercised by the need to understand, lacking the means to explain the phenomenon it is faced with. Three things really are at issue here: literature, literary studies/criticism, and philosophy. There are interrelationships among them, which is why some of the most important works relevant to the study of literary phenomena are by philosophers, normally the very greatest ones among them. We will not be exploring this history in detail, but only the engendering of literary criticism as a result of the philosophical interest in the literary, of which Plato and Aristotle were apparently the first to devote to it sustained attention. But we shall find that evolution and change within the history of criticism have been by following, sometimes without a conscious decision, the methods of reflection inaugurated in Aristotelian metaphysics in which philosophy is established as the knowledge of things through their ultimate causes.

Philosophy in Literary Forms

Facta Universitatis, Series: Linguistics and Literature

This paper looks into the literary forms of expressing philosophemes. Starting from the difference between scientific and literary forms of presenting philosophical ideas, we focus on discussing various literary forms that are present in philosophy. Philosophical works of poetry, prose, and drama are differentiated and considered, beginning with antiquity up to contemporary philosophy. Within this topic, we analyse the fundamental thematic orientation of representatives of the Enlightenment and existentialist philosophy, as well as the relationship between form and content in their works. The objective of this paper is to emphasize and expound on the thesis about the close correlation between literary forms and certain philosophical content, especially the correlation between literature and the philosophy of existentialism. The conclusion reached in the end is that literary works can be interpreted philosophically, but above all, that philosophical texts can be shaped in a literary ...

The literary representation of reality

Res Cogitans

This article presents a reflection of the epistemological question of literary representation of reality. The epistemological status of literature is not obvious, because literature is fictional. Therefore, it is not evident in what way literature represents reality and to what degree the literary representation is true in the corresponding sense of the word. Through an exploration of Proust and his reflections on the same question in A la recherche du temp perdu, this article will analyse the representational question. This analysis will focus on a conflict between an essential understanding of truth, detached from the temporal reality, and a superficial referential realism. It will present an alternative phenomenological and semiotic realism, which connects the specific description in literature with a general conceptual level. In addition, the relationship between the perceptual and conceptual level will further be linked to cognitive semantics and Lakoff’s concept of cognitive m...

The Philosopher’s Truth in Fiction

Chiasmi International

This interview with David Kleinberg-Levin, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University, concerns his recent trilogy on the promise of happiness in literary language. Kleinberg-Levin discusses the relationship between and among philosophy, phenomenology, and literature. Among others, he addresses questions regarding literature’s ability to offer redemption, its response to suffering and justice, literary gesture, the ethics of narrative logic, and the surface of the text.Cet entretien avec David Kleinberg-Levin, Professeur émérite au département de philosophie de la Northwestern University, est consacrée à sa récente trilogie sur la promesse du bonheur dans le langage littéraire. Kleinberg-Levin examine les relations réciproques et internes de la philosophie, de la phénoménologie et de la littérature. Entre autres, il pose des questions sur la capacité de la littérature à offrir une rédemption, sur sa réponse à la souffrance et à la justice, sur le g...

Literature and Philosophy: The poetic reason as epistemological link

One factor that has motivated some of this research was to see that there is a debate in different forums about the excessive specialization in all the fields related with knowledge. George Steiner already said that often "we are dedicated to producing overspecialized academic journalism in huge quantities". 2 Following these observations, we believe that this scenario manifests an urgent need to reconsider the disciplinary epistemological framework that is acquiring the imprint of fragmentary and onedimensional, creating a reductive view of humanity. In this sense, the purpose of this communication is to rescue the notion of transdisciplinarity as a possible structural link between philosophy and literature, establishing certain epistemological coodinates that rests on the idea of poetic reason by the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano, as well as in the invitation to the intellection through beauty by the Argentinean writer Leopoldo Marechal. Therefore, first, we'd like to briefly introduce the notion of transdisciplinarity, following the definitions of Basarab Nicolescu, to approach, then, to the poetic word as a condition of possibility of knowledge of reality. From there, we'll explain the most characteristic features of the concept of poetic reason and intellection through beauty, to open up a dialogical space between them and, thus, propose some transdisciplinary nature of the poetic word in our path to knowledge. The transdisciplinary opening 1 The author has a Master in Cultural Management from Carlos III University of Madrid and she is currently completing her PhD in Complutense University of Madrid, at Rationality, History and Aesthetics department. 2 STEINER, George. Los libros que nunca he escrito. Madrid: Siruela, 2008. p. 26.

The Question Of Truth In Literature: Die Poetische Auffassung Der Welt

2016

This chapter starts with the question of truth in literature, noting that this question has several interrelated senses: can literature present (significant) truths at all?; what does its presentation of truths (if it exists) have to do with its manner of presentation (with literary language)?; and is the presentation of truth a central aim of literary art? The chapter surveys a variety of neo-Fregean (Lamarque and Olsen, Walton) views that reject the very possibility of literary truth as well as a variety of anti-Fregean views (Goodman, Heidegger) that endorse it. But those endorsements often do not say enough about literary language and its grip on specific actualities. To move beyond this dispute, the chapter argues that Hegel, in his remarks on literary imagination in his Lectures on Fine Art, shows illuminatingly how literary writers sometimes arrive (and centrally aspire to arrive) at a distinctively poetic grasp of the world: die poetische Auffassung der Welt.

Questioning the Essence of Literature: A Deconstructive Reading of Ortega Y Gasset’s and Mikel Dufrenne’s Phenomenological Investigations of the Ideal Literary Object

مجلة کلیة الآداب .جامعة بورسعید

Phenomenology offers a presuppositionless methodology for investigating phenomena which does not determine their nature from a metaphysical, sociological or psychological standpoint but lets them stand on their own. It, therefore, functions as the eidetic science which determines the essences of phenomena and provides the ground on which theories which agree with their nature can be established. Through tracing José Ortega Y Gasset's and Mikel Dufrenne's static and genetic phenomenological investigations of literature, this article offers a deconstructive reading of their accounts. Although Jacques Derrida has also worked on a phenomenological investigation of literature, he has not been able to reach similar conclusions. The reason is that his investigation of the ideal literary object has led him to examine the metaphysical presupposition of the presumably presuppositionless method and how it controls Husserlian phenomenology. The present study extends Derrida's findings to other phenomenological investigations and shows how their metaphysical presupposition determines the results they reach in advance.

Analytical note on the relationship between literature and philosophy

The relationship between literature and philosophy is almost as old as the two academic disciplines themselves. Indeed, for a very long time, philosophy has been interested in literature and vice versa. Some philosophers like Kant, Hegel, or Schopenhauer among many others-have had recourse to epic, lyrical or dramatic poets because they realized, literary works can help them in their philosophical efforts to convey the message of truth, well-being, wisdom in society. The obstacle which prevented them from having recourse to it seemed to be the thread of the metaphysical tradition. But not everything can happen through metaphysics alone to be understood, useful in society. Thus, because of their stakes and their style, philosophies of existence rub shoulders even more closely with literary works. This applies to Heidegger, to Marcel, an admirer of Rilke, to Camus, a novelist before becoming an essayist, to Merleau-Ponty whose appeals to Valéry, Claudel or Proust are never accidental, to Sartre for whom the works of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet, and Flaubert counted as much as those of the philosophers. This article takes an analytical look at the relationship that may exist between literature and philosophy through language.

The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy

2014

Literature and philosophy have long shared an interest in questions of truth, value, and form. And yet, from ancient times to the present, they have oft en sharply diverged, both in their approach to these questions and in their relationship to one another. Moreover, the vast diff erences among individual writers, historical periods, and languages pose challenges for anyone wishing to understand the relationship between them. Th is Introduction provides a synthetic and original guide to this vast terrain. It uncovers the deep interests that literature and philosophy share while off ering a lucid account of their diff erences. It sheds new light on many standing debates and off ers students and scholars of literary criticism, literary theory, and philosophy a chance to think freshly about questions that have preoccupied the Western tradition from its very beginnings up until the present.