The Philosophy of Literature * By PETER LAMARQUE

Abstract

As a recent distinguished editor of British Journal of Aesthetics and a major contributor in his own right to recent debates on aesthetics and the philosophy of art – not least in the particular field with which this particular volume is concerned – Peter Lamarque is particularly well placed to author this survey of past and contemporary work on the philosophy of literature. Moreover, as those already familiar with Professor Lamarque's work will no doubt expect, this volume offers remarkably clear and extensive coverage of a wide and complex philosophical field in its relatively short space of under 300 pages. Following a short preface, the work is divided into seven chapters. The first, entitled ‘Art’, generally explores the relationship between philosophy, literary theory, art and literature and offers useful critical discussions of different concepts of aesthetics (as experience, ‘qualities’ and pleasure). The second looks more closely at the question of what it means to regard some texts as ‘literature’ and discusses a range of (essentialist and anti-essentialist) attempts to explain the special literary status of some texts. The third chapter examines the vexed question of the role and/or authority of the author in determining the meaning of literary works and offers some balanced and useful assessment of more extreme attempts of post-structuralists such as Barthes and Foucault to downplay this role. Chapter 4, entitled (a little vaguely) ‘Practice’, focuses more centrally on issues of literary meaning and interpretation, with some interesting exploration of the problems of taking discovery of meaning (at any rate, as this notion is often philosophically construed) to be the main focus of literary reading or criticism. Chapter 5 starts to open up difficult questions about the relationship of works of literature to reality and truth via exploration of the concept of fiction and attention to various attempts (from Meinong and Russell to more recent possible worlds semantics) to make sense of fictional or non-existent entities. Chapter 6 focuses more fully on important question of truth in literature and on the extent to or sense in which fictional or other works of literature might be regarded as sources of knowledge. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses different accounts of the value of literature, distinguishing between different conceptions of value as such, as well as offering a very useful (if somewhat sceptical) perspective on the moral significance of literature.