Philosophy and literature is a very wide field and this handbook does not try to cover every possible aspect. The coverage is however broad in that the philosophy and literature largely stemming from Ancient Greece on through the Western tradition is covered in many aspects. No judgement here is made of the value of the Western tradition in comparison with others. No claim is made that the Western tradition is itself self-contained and continuous in any pure way. It is simply the case that this philosophy and literature most known to an English-speaking audience and that a genuinely global and comparative approach, also making allowances for variations on the canon, would be a truly vast enterprise which would require more than one volume or would have to sacrifice depth and detail.
There is no attempt here to summarise the chapters in the Handbook or offer bibliographical information except for suggested readings at the end. What is done here is to provide a view of the themes and topics explored in sections and chapters of the book, so that the structure of the book is explained and readers already have a general background to each chapter. The background provided in this introduction does not duplicate or summarise what each author has said, what it does is provide the context for what the author has said within the broad development of philosophy and literature according to the view of the editors, so it provides another perspective, though one shaped in accordance with the book as a whole and what has been done in the individual chapters.
The volume has been constructed on the understanding that philosophy and literature cannot be thought of just as a confrontation between philosophy and literary texts or on the application of philosophical aesthetics to literature. There are various gradations of philosophy and literary studies which must be taken into account in order to have something like a fully representative survey of the field. The chapters have very different ways of dealing with the relation between philosophy and literature, broadly distinguished according to the structure of the book. The chapters are organised into sections on: ‘Philosophy as Literature’, ‘Philosophy of Literature’, ‘Philosophical Aesthetics’, ‘Literary Criticism and Theory’, and ‘Areas of Work Within Philosophy and Literature’. There is of course no absolute distinction between these areas, but in the view of the editors these distinctions are the best way of articulating what comes under philosophy and literature. That is, we can see the main elements of the field in this construction.
Part One: Philosophy as Literature
There is philosophy written as literature, the theme of Part One, which of course goes back very early in the history of philosophy and literature. There is no simple category of philosophy written as literature. The phrase itself might imply a kind of philosophy taking on the disguise of literature. This may be one approach to writing a literary kind of philosophy or thinking about the more literary aspects of philosophy, but what is more important is to think about the ways in which there is always something literary in philosophy and the more deep ways in which philosophy may be a particular kind of philosophy because of its literary style. Philosophy emerges from literature (also raising the status of myth in the beginning of both literature and philosophy) and is always at least in some minimal sense written in a style of some form, using figurative language and fiction to impress the reader. The most anti-literary kind of philosophical writing nevertheless appeals to imagination and the concrete nature of words at some points, because there is little chance of completely effective philosophical communication otherwise. What this part is more concerned with is the way philosophy can appear in the main literary genres. This includes some account of the way philosophy deals with discussion of the genre in question, since the philosophical discussion of genres and the philosophical use of genres are interactive processes. The main focus though is the ways in which philosophy can be written through literary genres.
Dialogue
The first philosophical works that survive as whole texts are Plato’s dialogues, and their appeal is certainly literary as well as philosophical. It is appropriate then that Dialogue is the topic of the first chapter of Part One. Aristotle also contributed to the literature of philosophical dialogues, though frustratingly these are lost. Cicero’s dialogues are less remarkable than those of Plato, but add to dialogue as a major form of philosophical writing. Cicero’s philosophical writings were part of his contribution to the formation of Latin style, towards the end of the Roman Republic. Boethius added to the use of dialogue in philosophy, shortly after the fall of the Roman state in the West. Later examples of philosophical dialogue include George Berkeley and David Hume, followed by passages in Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. This is philosophy written in such a way as to show the drama of ideas and of conflicts between ideas, presented though clashes between characters who speak. The genre of philosophical dialogue can itself be considered an element of novelistic form, since the conflict of ideas through the speech on characters features heavily in the novel, along with other forms of narrative including the more narrative kind of poetry. There is some division within philosophical dialogues between the ones with more literary and imaginative power, independent of the argument and the ones where the dialogue form seems more like clothing for the argument, maybe to make a provocative point of view seem more acceptable and more provisional since only held by a character in the dialogue. The former type begins with Plato and carries on through Kierkegaard. The latter type includes Cicero, carrying on through Berkeley and Hume. This is not to say that the latter type lack literary merit, but the dialogue form seems much more of a rhetorical adornment than a deep part of the argument. It is not clear that much is lost if they are transformed into direct prose, though of course even the role of dialogue here in making the argument more acceptable is a significant concern. The dialogue as a form for accommodating conflict of ideas expands into forms which are not immediately defined as dialogues but present voices with differing ideas within an authorial voice. Maybe the most striking examples are the spiritual struggles in Augustine of Hippo and the essays of Michel de Montaigne. In the latter case, a whole genre is developed, in part, through a displacement of conflict of ideas within a dialogue to rival ideas considered by the author.
Essays
As has just been established, the essay as an aspect of philosophy and literature is very much associated in its origin with Michel de Montaigne. He developed the essay as an important form of writing and a philosophical approach concerned with subjectivity, at the same time. His philosophical legacy is the Essays, in which the possibilities of individual inquiry, storytelling, and discursive philosophising are all explored through essays which test the limits of coherence of writing. This approach permeates later philosophy, though the more digressive aspects of Montaigne’s are mostly curbed in later practitioners from Francis Bacon through David Hume and Ralph Waldo Emerson to the authors of current scholarly articles in philosophy journals. Even though the philosophical essay in Bacon, Hume, and Emerson is relatively restrained and coherent compared with the work of Montaigne, it does provide an alternative to the technical style of the philosophical essay as it has developed since Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Their approach can be taken back a bit further to Charles Sanders Peirce, though he wrote in a less technical style. The technical philosophical essay can be taken back further to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the seventeenth century. Montaigne’s essay writing carries on through forms other than the essay, in the fragments of Blaise Pascal which combine variegated insights, the maxims, and reflections of Françoi...