Literary Forms of Argument in Early China examines the functions of rhetorical markers and devices as well as the patterns and larger modes structuring various styles of early Chinese argumentation. The nine contributors to the volume each present tight analyses of specific compositional or literary aspects of persuasion, hoping to demonstrate how an unabashed focus on the formal elements of philosophical writing might come to the aid of, or even more drastically alter and transform, philosophical interpretation. The volume (...) includes essays by the following nine scholars, who are at once a mixture of philologists, textual and literary specialists, and intellectual historians: Rudolph Wagner, Andrew Plaks, David... (shrink)

Preface LITERARY FORM, PHILOSOPHICAL CONTENT: HISTORICAL STUDIES OF PHILO- sophical Genres aims at a wide audience and is intended to be serviceable for ...

In "Literary Forms of Argument in Early China," Gentz and Meyer explore a new analytical approach to the study of written thinking by focusing on the argumentative function of literary patterns in early Chinese texts.

A formalist approach to literature, one that bears witness to the movements of distinct levels of form as they compel one another to a kind of infra-literary psychoanalysis, helps move us beyond the critical dichotomies — text vs. context, history vs. form, realism vs. the avant-garde — that have sometimes hampered recognition of the topologically complex and uneven fashion in which literature intervenes in the world. This article argues that it is the particular modes of constriction, isolation and textual (...) withdrawal that literature induces which paradoxically reveal literature’s psychoanalytic approach to its outsides. The article begins by close-reading a few short passages from Lacan, passages which when reframed offer the initial ingredients of a psychoanalytically informed materialist literary-critical formalism. It then turns to Paul de Man’s late reflections on literary form and materiality, before concluding with a reading of the poetry of Geoffrey G. O’Brien. (shrink)

A DISCUSSION OF: CATHERINE COLLOBERT, PIERRE DESTRÉE, FRANCISCO J. GONZALEZ , PLATO AND MYTH: STUDIES ON THE USE AND STATUS OF PLATONIC MYTHS. MNEMOSYNE. SUPPLEMENTS, 337. LEIDEN/BOSTON: BRILL, 2012. PP. VIII + 476. ISBN 9789004218666. $222.00.

By examining in particular Augustan notions of probability and the way they provided a framework for thinking about and organising experience, Dr Patey ...

The paper offers a qualified endorsement of Terry Eagleton’s striking claim that “a work’s moral outlook … may be secreted as much in its form as its content”. A number of points are raised in defence of the claim: an argument for the inseparability, under certain conditions, of form and content in a literary work; an idea of moral content, not as derived moral principle, but as inward-facing interpretation grounded in an ethical vocabulary; the possibility of internal and external (...) perspectives on fictional characters; and an emphasis on emotions expressed in, rather than caused by, narrative. Three literary examples are explored, to show how vocabulary, syntax, implicature, and tone, contribute to the emergence of moral salience. A consequence drawn is that the ethical stance readers take to a scene or incident is partially shaped by the narrative modes of its presentation. The overall perspective of the paper is that of aesthetic autonomism: the view that the aesthetic value of a work of literature is distinct from, and not reducible to, any instrumental moral values (positive or negative) attributed to the work. (shrink)

Probes the nature of linguistic or symbolic action as it relates to specific novels, plays, and poems.

A common contention of literary criticism is that literary forms can express, reflect, shape, represent or otherwise give form to human life. Literature can seem to offer the same idea as a promise of life’s meaningfulness; where expressive form is powerful, life need not be empty. Can literary forms give form to human life? I will argue for one sense in which this is true. As will become clear, at stake in this inquiry is not simply an (...) idea about the meaningfulness of literature’s poetry, but a way of answering the question of what it means to be human. (shrink)

Widely chosen by students of society as an approach under which to labour, emancipatory, liberatory or, otherwise put, critical social thought occupies a position between knowledge and practical action whose coherence is taken for granted on account of the pressing nature of the issues it attempts to deal with. As such it is rarely subjected to scrutiny and the methodological, conceptual and moral challenges it faces are not properly identified. The contribution of this article is to raise these problems into (...) view clearly and unambiguously. This is undertaken via a careful examination of Alice Crary’s recent work, in which she attempts, firstly, to defend a left-Hegelian version of Critical Theory by relating it to the work of Peter Winch and, second, to issue a set of methodologically radical recommendations on employing the sensibility-shaping powers of the literary form. The article aims to deepen our understanding of the fundamental tensions between the Critical Theory and Wittgensteinian traditions, which Crary attempts to bring together and, ultimately, of those crucial features of our moral practices that frustrate the enterprise of critical social thought. (shrink)

It was [Maria] Edgeworth’s deeply personal motive in writing Harrington that made possible the special self-reflexive quality that informs her novel. In the act of reviewing her role as a reader and a writer of anti-Semitic portraits, she was able to recognize a tradition of discourse she had at once inherited and perpetuated. And only by recognizing such a tradition was she able both to subvert it in Harrington and to articulate for future writers the way to move beyond it. (...) In short, she boldly turned her personal self-examination into a cultural critique: she diagnosed a disorder in “the imaginations of the good people of England,”4 and in so doing she issued a challenge and founded a new tradition. In Harrington Edgeworth inquires into the trials that the English imagination must undergo if it is to exorcise the powerful figure of Shylock, and thereby issues a challenge taken up in subsequent novels : the tradition I am designating “the novel of Jewish Identity” attempts to articulate, investigate, and subvert The Merchant of Venice’s function as the English master text for representing “the Jew.” Maria Edgeworth, Harrington, vol. 9 of Tales and Novels , p. 148; hereafter cited by page number. Michael Ragussis, professor of English at Georgetown University, is the author of The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic Tradition and Acts of Naming: The Family Plot in Fiction . He is currently working on a book-length study entitled “Figures of Conversion: Jewish Identity and British Fiction.”. (shrink)

Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published [following peer-review] in Hume Studies, published by and copyright Hume Society.

"The problem of art in the modern era," according to the opening of Audrey Wasser's The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form, "is the problem of the new". Citing the familiar maxim of Ezra Pound, "make it new," Wasser locates in the problem of novelty the problem of modern art as such. Modernity inherits its fixation on the new from a longer tradition, which for Wasser begins with the German romantics in the wake of (...) Kantian aesthetics. Crucial for Wasser is the way in which the romantic philosophers, particularly Friedrich Schlegel and other contributors to the Athenaeum, attempted to resolve the problems with the Kantian system by "invest[ing] the literary with the... (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu's work on literature has frequently been criticized for its perceived failure to attend to the specificities of literary form. This article argues that, in fact, literary form plays an important role in Bourdieu's theorizations of literature, or rather, that form is called upon to play a range of different, potentially conflicting roles. Through close readings of both The Rules of Art and the 1975 essay ‘L'Invention de la vie d'artiste’, the article seeks to clarify the different (...) roles Bourdieu attributes to literary form, as that which both conceals and reveals ‘repressed’, ‘incorporated’ or ‘unconscious’ social realities. It will examine Bourdieu's contention that the literary work functions analogously to the Freudian dreamwork in this respect, and will question how appropriate or convincing that analogy proves to be. (shrink)

This paper examines Hume's four essays on happiness: the "Epicurean," the "Stoic," the "Platonist," and the "Sceptic." I argue, first, that careful attention to how these essays are written shows that they do not simply argue for one position over others. They also elicit affective and imaginative responses in order to modify the reader's outlook and to improve the reader's understanding in service to moral ends. The analysis offers an improved reading of the essays and highlights the intimate connections between (...) the purposes of philosophical writing and its manner of presentation. Secondly, I contend that appreciating how Hume's essays on happiness work on the reader demonstrates the insufficiency of Hume's categories of "anatomist" and "painter.". (shrink)

Starting from the identification and characterization of three literary forms that coexist throughout Parmenides’ Poem, all of them plainly different from each other, it is proposed and demonstrated that such a variety of forms mirrors the delimitation of the different ways of thought and language elaborated by Parmenidic philosophy, in which at least two types of nature of knowledge must be recognized: the logical and the cosmological. The first, marked by a formally logical-argumentative speech which is given the name (...) of truth (aletheia) and whose way of thinking is exclusively noetic; the second, of a theoretical-descriptive nature, dedicated to the consideration of the movement proper to cosmic phenomena, whose devenir demands an equally mobile way of thinking (phronein). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary FormDavid SiderCharles H. Kahn. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxi 1 431 pp. Cloth, $64.95.An enduring question in Plato studies is whether—and if so how—Plato developed as a thinker. A simple positive answer, as argued by Taylor and Burnet, has Plato starting out (...) his philosophical life as an associate of Socrates who adopted and portrayed his teacher’s ideas in the early dialogues (some few of them, in this reviewer’s opinion, perhaps antedating Socrates’ death). Then, upon further and continual reflection, of a Socratic sort no doubt, Plato slowly or quickly (some would mark the spot at Symposium 210a) began to espouse views never held by his rabbi. Or—as, e.g., Shorey and Cherniss would hold—Plato knew his own mind, if not at the very first then at least in his earliest published writings, holding to these same beliefs throughout his life.Neither position is intrinsically impossible or even unlikely. But faced with the various literary devices and philosophical ploys with which Plato shapes his dialogues, it is not surprising that developmentalists predominate over unitarians in Plato studies, each side generally content to leave the other alone in its ignorance. Now comes Charles Kahn to show how both sides may be right: while Plato the thinker behind the dialogues had firm views from which he rarely deviated throughout his life, he planned years in advance how these ideas would best be presented to the public, and in what order. It is, then, [End Page 624] only the dialogues that develop, according to a prearranged scheme that constitutes, as the subtitle has it, Plato’s “philosophical use of a literary form.” (Kahn’s review of the history of the dialogue form in chapter 1 is excellent, with especially valuable remarks on Antisthenes, but is not strictly necessary for his thesis.) This intriguing idea is worthy of Kahn, whose writings on pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, and beyond always command immediate attention and frequently become standard entries in later bibliographies. It is particularly noteworthy that in an earlier attempt at a different sort of reconciliation, Kahn—when all the rest of us believed that Empedocles wrote two major works, one “scientific” and the other “religious”—showed how these apparently different works in fact complemented each other. Now, after Osborne’s argument that Empedocles wrote but one poem has been proved correct by the Strasbourg papyrus, Kahn’s paper holds up remarkably well. Kahn’s own bibliography in the present volume also contains articles written as far back as 1983 (“Drama and Dialectic in Plato’s Gorgias,” OSAP 1:75–121) that not only maintain and develop the idea he is considering but also illustrate how a thinker can space out his already fully formed thesis in well-articulated units—just as Kahn argues Plato did over a large portion of his own oeuvre, specifically the eighteen dialogues from Apology to Phaedrus.It is not that there is no Socratic period, rather that it would now be limited only to the four dialogues Apology, Crito, Ion, and Hippias Minor (93). Hard-core developmentalists and unitarians will want to see whether Kahn can convince them to alter long-held views about so important an aspect of Plato’s dialogues and thought. To convince them, however, Kahn, like the developmentalists, should ideally present a case for the chronological order of composition and publication that depends solely upon external criteria, so as not to beg the question of how, in his own view, the dialogues were made to develop. (The unitarian view would remain theoretically unaltered were it to be proved that, say, Parmenides was written before Laches.) It must be said, however, that on this most essential point, Kahn has not altogether managed to avoid circularity. In part, this is because external evidence tells us very little about Plato’s intellectual development: the Seventh Letter is fascinating but short on details, and Aristotle’s account “is not historically reliable” (41 n. 10, developed further in chapter 3, where, amazingly, an account explicitly... (shrink)

We attempt to offer a new interpretation of Schlegel’s original solution for the problem of the new mythology. We claim that, while grasping the problem of the missing center as the structure of modern thought, Schlegel develops a theory of literature which implies an ontology of time. We advance that, by identifying myth with romantic literature, Schlegel’s argumentative economy leads him to apply the metaphysical predicates of myth to romantic literature as such. We propose then to read the status of (...) literary forms as constituting the substance which precedes them but, paradoxically, only exists through them. (shrink)

Too often the study of philosophical texts is carried out in ways that do not pay significant attention to how the ideas contained within them are presented, articulated, and developed. This was not always the case. The contributors to this collected work consider Jewish philosophy in the medieval period, when new genres and forms of written expression were flourishing in the wake of renewed interest in ancient philosophy. Many medieval Jewish philosophers were highly accomplished poets, for example, and made conscious (...) efforts to write in a poetic style. This volume turns attention to the connections that medieval Jewish thinkers made between the literary, the exegetical, the philosophical, and the mystical to shed light on the creativity and diversity of medieval thought. As they broaden the scope of what counts as medieval Jewish philosophy, the essays collected here consider questions about how an argument is formed, how text is put into the service of philosophy, and the social and intellectual environment in which philosophical texts were produced. (shrink)

This book proposes a new paradigm for the interpretation of Plato's early and middle dialogues. Rejecting the usual assumption of a distinct 'Socratic' period in the development of Plato's thought, this view regards the earlier works as deliberate preparation for the exposition of Plato's mature philosophy. Differences between the dialogues do not represent different stages in Plato's own thinking but rather different aspects and moments in the presentation of a new and unfamiliar view of reality. Once the fictional character of (...) the Socratic genre is recognised, there is no reason to regard Plato's early dialogues as representing the philosophy of the historical Socrates. The result is a unified interpretation of all of the dialogues down to the Republic and the Phaedrus. (shrink)