Philosophy and literature involves the literary
treatment of philosophers and philosophical
themes (the literature of philosophy), and
the philosophical treatment of issues raised
by literature (the philosophy of literature).
== The philosophy of literature ==
Strictly speaking, the philosophy of literature
is a branch of aesthetics, the branch of philosophy
that deals with the question, "what is art"?
Much of aesthetic philosophy has traditionally
focused on the plastic arts or music, however,
at the expense of the verbal arts. In fact,
much traditional discussion of aesthetic philosophy
seeks to establish criteria of artistic quality
that are indifferent to the subject matter
being depicted. Since all literary works,
almost by definition, contain notional content,
aesthetic theories that rely on purely formal
qualities tend to overlook literature.
The very existence of narrative raises philosophical
issues. In narrative, a creator can embody,
and readers be led to imagine, fictional characters,
and even fantastic creatures or technologies.
The ability of the human mind to imagine,
and even to experience empathy with, these
fictional characters is itself revealing about
the nature of the human mind. Some fiction
can be thought of as a sort of a thought experiment
in ethics: it describes fictional characters,
their motives, their actions, and the consequences
of their actions. It is in this light that
some philosophers have chosen various narrative
forms to teach their philosophy (see below).
=== Literature and language ===
Plato, for instance, believed that literary
culture and even the lyrics of popular music
had a strong impact on the ethical outlook
of its consumers. In The Republic, Plato displays
a strong hostility to the contents of the
literary culture of his period, and proposes
a strong censorship of popular literature
in his utopia.
More recently, however, philosophers of various
stripes have taken different and less hostile
approaches to literature. Since the work of
the British Empiricists and Immanuel Kant
in the late eighteenth century, Western philosophy
has been preoccupied with a fundamental question
of epistemology: the question of the relationship
between ideas in the human mind and the world
existing outside the mind, if in fact such
a world exists. In more recent years, these
epistemological issues have turned instead
to an extended discussion of words and meaning:
can language in fact bridge the barrier between
minds? This cluster of issues concerning the
meaning of language and of "writings" sometimes
goes by the name of the linguistic turn.
As such, techniques and tools developed for
literary criticism and literary theory rose
to greater prominence in Western philosophy
of the late twentieth century. Philosophers
of various stripes paid more attention to
literature than their predecessors did. Some
sought to examine the question of whether
it was in fact truly possible to communicate
using words, whether it was possible for an
author's intended meaning to be communicated
to a reader. Others sought to use literary
works as examples of contemporary culture,
and sought to reveal unconscious attitudes
they felt present in these works for the purpose
of social criticism.
=== The truth of fiction ===
Literary works also pose issues concerning
truth and the philosophy of language. In educated
opinion, at least, it is commonly reputed
as true that Sherlock Holmes lived in London.
(see David Lewis 'Truth in Fiction', American
Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 15. No. 1, January
1978) It is also considered true that Samuel
Pepys lived in London. Yet Sherlock Holmes
never lived anywhere at all; he is a fictional
character. Samuel Pepys, contrarily, is judged
to have been a real person. Contemporary interest
in Holmes and in Pepys share strong similarities;
the only reason why anyone knows either of
their names is because of an abiding interest
in reading about their alleged deeds and words.
These two statements would appear to belong
to two different orders of truth. Further
problems arise concerning the truth value
of statements about fictional worlds and characters
that can be implied but are nowhere explicitly
stated by the sources for our knowledge about
them, such as Sherlock Holmes had only one
head or Sherlock Holmes never travelled to
the moon.
== The literature of philosophy ==
=== 
Philosophical poems ===
A number of poets have written poems on philosophical
themes, and some important philosophers have
expressed their philosophy in verse. The cosmogony
of Hesiod and the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius
are important philosophical poems. The genre
of epic poetry was also used to teach philosophy.
Vyasa narrated the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata
in order to teach Indian philosophy and Hindu
philosophy. Homer also presented some philosophical
teachings in his Odyssey.
Many of the Eastern philosophers worked out
their thought in poetical fashion. Some of
the important names include:
Vyasa
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Omar Khayyám
Nizami Ganjavi
Sheikh Saadi
Hafiz Shirazi
Muhammad Iqbal
Matsuo Bashō
Farid ud-Din Attar
Salah Abd El-sabur
Mahmoud Darwish
Karim ElsaiadNotable Western philosophical
poets include:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
St. John of the Cross
T. S. Eliot
Hildegard von Bingen
Homer
John Milton
Percy Bysshe Shelley
James Wright
Marianne Moore
Pablo Neruda
William Carlos Williams
Mary Oliver
Rainer Maria Rilke
Leslie Marmon Silko
Robert Creeley
Fernando Pessoa
Søren Kierkegaard
Friedrich Nietzsche
Georges Bataille
Lucretius
=== 
Philosophical fiction ===
Some philosophers have undertaken to write
philosophy in the form of fiction, including
novels and short stories (see separate article
on philosophical fiction). This is apparent
early on in the literature of philosophy,
where philosophers such as Plato wrote dialogues
in which fictional or fictionalized characters
discuss philosophical subjects; Socrates frequently
appears as a protagonist in Plato's dialogues,
and the dialogues are one of the prime sources
of knowledge about Socrates' teaching, though
at this remove it is sometimes hard to distinguish
Socrates' actual positions from Plato's own.
Numerous early Christian writers, including
Augustine, Boethius, and Peter Abelard produced
dialogues; several early modern philosophers,
such as George Berkeley and David Hume, wrote
occasionally in this genre.
Other philosophers have resorted to narrative
to get their teachings across. The classical
12th century Islamic philosopher, Abubacer
(Ibn Tufail), wrote a fictional Arabic narrative
Philosophus Autodidactus as a response to
al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers,
and then the 13th century Islamic theologian-philosopher
Ibn al-Nafis also wrote a fictional narrative
Theologus Autodidactus as a response to Abubacer's
Philosophus Autodidactus. The German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche often articulated his
ideas in literary modes, most notably in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, a re-imagined account of
the teachings of Zoroaster. Marquis de Sade
and Ayn Rand wrote novels in which characters
served as mouthpieces for philosophical positions,
and act in accordance with them in the plot.
George Santayana was also a philosopher who
wrote novels and poetry; the relationship
between Santayana's characters and his beliefs
is more complex. The existentialists include
among their numbers important French authors
who used fiction to convey their philosophical
views; these include Jean-Paul Sartre's novel
Nausea and play No Exit, and Albert Camus's
The Stranger. Maurice Blanchot's entire fictional
production, whose titles include The Step
Not Beyond, The madness of the Day, and The
Writing of Disaster, among others, constitutes
an indispensable corpus for the treatment
of the relationship between philosophy and
literature. So does Jacques Derrida's The
Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond.
A number of philosophers have had important
influence on literature. Arthur Schopenhauer,
largely as a result of his system of aesthetics,
is perhaps the most influential recent philosopher
in the history of literature; Thomas Hardy's
later novels frequently allude to Schopenhauerian
themes, particularly in Jude the Obscure.
Schopenhauer also had an important influence
on Joseph Conrad. Schopenhauer also had a
less specific but more widely diffused influence
on the Symbolist movement in European literature.
Lionel Johnson also refers to Schopenhauer's
aesthetics in his essay The Cultured Faun.
Jacques Derrida's entire oeuvre has been hugely
influential for so-called continental philosophy
and the understanding of the role of literature
in modernity.
Other works of fiction considered to have
philosophical content include:
Abubacer, Philosophus Autodidactus
Albert Camus, The Outsider
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
James Joyce, Ulysses
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of
Being
Ibn al-Nafis, Theologus Autodidactus
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Sergio Troncoso, The Nature of Truth
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
=== 
Philosophical writing as literature ===
A number of philosophers are still read for
the literary merits of their works apart from
their philosophical content. The philosophy
in the Meditations of the Roman emperor Marcus
Aurelius is unoriginal Stoicism, but the Meditations
are still read for their literary merit and
for the insight they give into the workings
of the emperor's mind.
Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy is noted
for the quality and readability of its prose,
as are some of the works of the British Empiricists,
such as Locke and Hume. Søren Kierkegaard's
style is frequently regarded as poetic artistry
as well as philosophical, especially in Fear
and Trembling and Either/Or. Friedrich Nietzsche's
works such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra frequently
resemble prose poetry and contain imagery
and allusion instead of argument.
== Philosophy in literature ==
=== Philosophers in literature ===
Socrates appears in a highly fictionalized
guise, as a comic figure and the object of
mockery, in The Clouds by Aristophanes. In
the play, Socrates appears hanging from a
basket, where he delivers oracles such as:
I'd never come up with a single thing about
celestial phenomena,if I did not suspend my
mind up high,to mix my subtle thoughts with
what's like them—the air. If I turned my
mind to lofty things,but stayed there on the
ground, I'd never makethe least discovery.
For the earth, you see,draws moist thoughts
down by force into itself—the same process
takes place with water cress.Jorge Luis Borges
is perhaps the twentieth century's preeminent
author of philosophical fiction. He wrote
a short story in which the philosopher Averroes
is the chief protagonist, Averroes's Search.
Many plot points in his stories accurately
paraphrase and epitomize the thought of major
philosophers, including George Berkeley, Arthur
Schopenhauer, and Bertrand Russell; he also
attributes various opinions to figures including
George Dalgarno.
A key plot point in Umberto Eco's novel The
Name of the Rose turns on the discovery of
a mysterious book that turns out to contain
a lost manuscript by Aristotle. Eco's later
novel Foucault's Pendulum became the forerunner
of a run of thrillers or detective fiction
that toss around learned allusions and the
names of historical thinkers; more recent
examples include Dan Brown's The Da Vinci
Code and The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell
and Dustin Thomason.
Also, Philip K. Dick, who has often been compared
to Borges, raises a significant number of
philosophical issues in his novels, everything
from the problem of solipsism to many questions
of perception and reality.
=== Fictional philosophers ===
Jorge Luis Borges introduces many philosophical
themes, and a number of fictional philosophers,
in his short stories. A fictional philosophical
movement is a part of the premise of his story
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, and the unnamed
narrator of his story The Library of Babel
could also be called a fictional philosopher.
A fictional theologian is the subject of his
story Three Versions of Judas.
Fictional philosophers occasionally occur
throughout the works of Robert A. Heinlein
and Ray Bradbury. Heinlein's Stranger in a
Strange Land contains long passages that could
be considered as successors to the fictionalized
philosophical dialogues of the ancient world,
set within the plot.
== See also ==
The arts and politics
Literary translation
Translation criticism
Science fiction as thought experiment
== References ==
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Ted Honderich,
ed., (Oxford University Press, 1995) ISBN
0-19-866132-0
Borges, Jorge Luis, Collected Fictions, 1998.
Translated by Andrew Hurley. ISBN 0-14-028680-2.
Magee, Bryan, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer
(Oxford University Press, revised edition,
1977) ISBN 0-19-823722-7.
== Journals ==
Philosophy and Literature, founded in 1977
Zeno, founded in 1980
== External links ==
Andrew Miller, The Truth Value of Statements
Containing Names of Literary Characters as
Subjects (2002 thesis)
Philosophy and Literature at Paideia Archive
Philosophy and Literature at Stanford, directed
by R. Lanier Anderson and Joshua Landy
Duke's Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature,
directed by Toril Moi
