Abstract

Even though philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition have often disagreed about the nature of their subject, they were, until quite recently, of one mind in regarding philosophy as utterly different from literature and the literary arts. Philosophy was the realm of argument and literal truth; literature, the realm of fancy, rhetoric, figurative embellishment and fiction. But the tide has changed. The guiding star of Logical Positivism no longer burns so brightly, the influence of the continent has begun to tell, and we are now confronted by a very much more generous account of philosophy and its relation to literature.