PHIL 226 - Philosophy and Literature

Credit(s): 3
Lecture: 3
Non-Lecture: 0
This course will begin by looking at Plato’s reasons for finding an “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” and Aristotle’s response. This will lead to a discussion of what is, or should be, the effect of imaginative literature. More specifically-and this will be the course’s central focus-we will consider whether literature can make a contribution to our ethical knowledge in a way that philosophy does not. Inevitably this will bring up questions about the cognitive and evaluative nature of emotion. We will look, too, at two plays by Sartre to see what, if anything, they add to his purely philosophical writings. Finally, we will consider briefly whether it is possible for a work of literature to be aesthetically excellent yet morally suspect. Offered every other spring.