Серия "Literature and Philosophy"

Living Poetically is the first book to focus primarily on Kierkegaard's existential aesthetics as opposed to traditional aesthetic features of his writings such as the use of pseudonyms, literary techniques and figures, and literary criticism. Living Poetically traces the development of the concept of the poetic in Kierkegaard's writings as that concept is worked out in an ethical-religious perspective in contrast to the aesthetics of early German romanticism and Hegelian idealism....

The relationship between an author's and an audience's intentions is complex but need not preclude mutual engagement. This philosophical investigation challenges existing literary and rhetorical perspectives on intention and offers a new framework for understanding the negotiation of meaning. It describes how an audience's intentions affect their interpretations, shows how audiences negotiate meaning when faced with a writer's undecipherable intentions, and defines the scope...

This book proposes to rethink the relationship between philosophy and literature through an engagement with Plato’s dialogues. The dialogues have been seen as the source of a long tradition that subordinates poetry to philosophy, but they may also be approached as a medium for understanding how to overcome this opposition. Paradoxically, Plato then becomes an ally in the attempt “to overturn Platonism,” which Gilles Deleuze famously defined as the task of modern...

In The Smile of Tragedy , Daniel Ahern examines Nietzsche’s attitude toward what he called “the tragic age of the Greeks,” showing it to be the foundation not only for his attack upon the birth of philosophy during the Socratic era but also for his overall critique of Western culture. Through an interpretation of “Dionysian pessimism,” Ahern clarifies the ways in which Nietzsche sees ethics and aesthetics as inseparable and how their theoretical...

Sensationism, a philosophy that gained momentum in the French Enlightenment as a response to Lockean empiricism, was acclaimed by Hippolyte Taine as "the doctrine of the most lucid, methodical, and French minds to have honored France." The first major general study in English of eighteenth-century French sensationism, The Authority of Experience presents the history of a complex set of ideas and explores their important ramifications for literature, education, and moral...