Difficulty Of Reality Research Articles

Cora Diamond and John Dewey on the Difficulties of Reality: Two Readings of Coetzee’s <I>The Lives of Animals</I>

Cora Diamond and John Dewey on the Difficulties of Reality: Two Readings of Coetzee’s <I>The Lives of Animals</I>

The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy, by Stephen Mulhall.

The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy, by Stephen Mulhall.

The Wounded Animal: J.M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy. By Stephen Mulhall.

In 1997, Nobel Prize-winning novelist and critic J.M. Coetzee delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University. Departing from the Lectures’ standard format of philosophical address, Coetzee instead read a work of fiction about an esteemed Australian novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture at a fictional college in the USA. Stephen Mulhall begins The Wounded Animal with the suggestion that Coetzee's Tanner Lectures—which were published in 1999 as The Lives of Animals, and later as part of his 2003 novel, Elizabeth Costello—mark ‘a deliberate attempt’ to reopen the perennial ‘quarrel’ between philosophy and literature (p. 1), thus setting the scene for an assessment of both Coetzee's confrontation with philosophy, and subsequent philosophical responses to Coetzee, including those of Peter Singer, Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell. Mulhall's central claim is that Coetzee's writings about Costello illustrate philosophy's failure to adequately represent the reality it seeks to convey and understand. His argument is twofold. On the one hand, philosophers have failed because of their refusal to engage with the ‘difficulty of reality’ (a phrase gleaned from Diamond), a refusal symptomatic of ‘philosophy's capacity to be deflected from those difficulties precisely because of its characteristic ways of attempting to respond to the claims of reason’ (p. 69). On the other hand, philosophers have failed because reality, in its difficulty, resists such projects of understanding. In this respect, argues Mulhall, philosophy has a great deal to learn from literature's attempts (and in particular Coetzee's attempts) to come to terms with reality's resistance to that very understanding. It is this twofold picture—philosophy's failure to face up to reality and reality's resistance to philosophical understanding—that is the guiding thread of Mulhall's enterprise.

Reality and Philosophy: Reflections on Cora Diamond's Work

AbstractThe publication of Cora Diamond's important 2002 “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy” (in Philosophy and Animal Life) stimulated the writing of this essay. “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy” attempted to show that there are experiences of reality (recounted especially in literature like John Coetzee's novels and Ted Hughes' poetry) in relation to which philosophical concepts and words encounter difficulty. The experiences resist conceptualization. By examining several of Diamond's earlier writings, I try to show that the difficulty of philosophical conceptualization of reality is due to the fact that reality does not exist external to experience. Reality being internal to experience means that reality contains an unfixed set of possibilities. Being experiential, reality is historical. The historical dimension of reality – such as the reality of animal life suffering – makes the words through we describe this reality too weak, i.e. they are not powerful enough to capture reality, hence the difficulty. Consequently, as I argue, for Diamond, the weakness of words means that words are never complete concepts. The meaning of them seems always still to come since reality seems always to have a surplus of possibilities. I suggest that because of this always still “to come” aspect of the meaning of words, we might characterise Diamond's thought as a messianism.

The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy���by mulhall, stephen

<i>The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy</i>���by mulhall, stephen

The wounded animal: J.M. Coetzee and the difficulty of reality in literature and philosophy

ABBREVIATIONS ix CHAPTER ONE: Introduction: The Ancient Quarrel 1 PART ONE: THE LIVES OF ANIMALS 19 CHAPTER TWO: Elizabeth Costello's Lecture: Stories, Thought-Experiments, and Literal-Mindedness 21 CHAPTER THREE: Elizabeth Costello's Lecture: Three Philosophers and a Number of Apes 36 CHAPTER FOUR: Food for Thought: Two Symposia 58 CHAPTER FIVE: Food for Thought: A Third Symposium 69 CHAPTER SIX: Food for Thought: An Uninvited Guest? 95 CHAPTER SEVEN: Elizabeth Costello's Seminar: Two Poets and a Novelist 110 CHAPTER EIGHT: Elizabeth Costello's Seminar: Primatology and Animal Training, Philosophy and Literary Theory 122 PART TWO: ELIZABETH COSTELLO 137 CHAPTER NINE: Realism, Modernism, and the Novel 139 CHAPTER TEN: Costello's Realist Modernism, and Coetzee's 162 CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Body in Africa 184 CHAPTER TWELVE: Evil as Obscenity 203 CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Two Embodiments of the Kafkaesque 214 CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Conclusion: Three Postscripts 231 BIBLIOGRAPHY 253 INDEX 257

Educating the Heart: Realism, Reason, and the Novel

fourteen-chapter book. Mulhall borrows idea of a difficulty of from his fellow philosopher Cora Diamond, who uses it to designate experiences in which something in reality seems hard or impossible or agonizing to get one's mind around (70), or in Mulhall's formulation, the possibility of experiencing something that is perfectly everyday as constitutively enigmatic (92). Both philosophers adopt a Wittgensteinian view that in Western philosophy, an imperialism of reason with respect to real (116) systematically deflects such difficulties, and they link this tendency to Plato's founding repudiation of literature as register of emotion, immanence, and concreteness as against philosophy's defining commitment to intellect, transcendence, and universality. The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy instead tries to delineate vital areas of common concern between literature and philosophy. Specifically, book suggests how post-Wittgensteinian philosophy and contemporary novelistic realism can in effect perform limitations of

The Difficulty of Reality in Zones of Abandonment

The Difficulty of Reality in Zones of Abandonment

The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy

I am concerned in this paper with a range of phenomena, which, in the first four sections of the paper, I shall suggest by some examples. In the last three sections, I try to connect the topic thus indicated with the thought of Stanley Cavell.

The Obkom First Secretaries

If upon occasion in the past Nikita Khrushchev took an indulgent view of the Stalinist process of natural selection in the Party apparatus, it would hardly have been surprising. He was, after all, a most prominent product and beneficiary of it. Yet, without in any way criticizing the process as such, Khrushchev constantly manifested a nagging concern over its end results. In part this concern may be attributed, as it often has been, to a readiness to regard personnel changes as a panacea for difficulties in reality stemming from deep structural flaws in the Soviet economy and administrative system. And it can hardly be denied that in 1962 and 1963 Khrushchev was confronted with serious difficulties in agriculture and industry. But there is also little reason to doubt that he was genuinely worried about the effectiveness— and hence the quality—of Party cadres, or, furthermore, that there were grounds for his uneasiness.