Philosophy in literature

H. P. Rickman

In this book, scholar and author H. P. Rickman considers the entanglement of philosophy and literature, as felt by both philosophers and poets alike. Although the two fields are distinct because argumentation is an essential characteristic of the former, and presentation is vital to the latter, the two disciplines share such features as a distance from practical, everyday life. They also supplement each other. While philosophers employ such literary devices as dialogue and metaphors, poets and novelists write about virtue and vice, truth and illusion, the passage of time, the vagaries of human nature, and the workings of destiny, concepts which all receive helpful illumination in philosophy. Literary theory, a recently mushroomed discipline, makes claims of being a metatheory of literature, and at times aims to eclipse, at others to embrace, the field of philosophy. Descriptions of literary theory range from a specialized study of principles grounding literature and literary criticism to a superdiscipline employing linguistics, psychology, and philosophy itself. However, accommodation, and even confrontation between philosophy and literary theory, is made difficult by divergent methodological approaches. Philosophy, unlike literary theory, is committed to unambiguous clarity and logical consistency and opposed to the obscure neologisms thrown up by some literary theorists.