Philosophy and Literature at Stanford

ANNOUNCEMENTS
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Wednesday, February 8th, 2012, 5:15-7:15 p.m.
Pigott Hall, Building 260, Room 216
Malcolm Turvey (Film, Sarah Lawrence College): "Vertov, The View from Nowhere, and the Expanding Circle," a discussion of Dziga Vertov's "A Sixth Part of the World."

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012, 5:15-7:15 p.m.
Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center
Roundtable on Nihilism
Discussants: R. Jay Wallace (Philosophy, Berkeley), Robert Harrison (French and Italian, Stanford), Nancy Ruttenberg (English, Stanford)
Cosponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012, 5:15-7:15 p.m.
Room TBA
Herb Clarke (Psychology, Stanford).

Watch Michael Emerson, The Philosophy of LOST (part of the Film & Philosophy II Conference, January 2011).

Now available for viewing / listening -- video and audio recordings of Philosophy and Literature events.

Every novel says to the reader: ‘Things are not as simple as you think.’ That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers.—Milan Kundera

What is so fascinating about works like Plato's dialogues and Dostoevsky's novels? Can philosophy and literature, in such combinations, achieve more than the sum of the two parts? Can philosophical approaches account for the specific power of literary works, even those that are not overtly philosophical? And can literary devices contribute to philosophical goals—in a way, perhaps, that nothing else could?

Founded in 2004, the initiative in Philosophy and Literature brings together Stanford’s vibrant group of literary scholars and its renowned philosophy department to answer questions like these. The initiative currently comprises a set of undergraduate major tracks, a graduate student workshop, and faculty-led events. Recent interests of participating faculty include:

the nature and value of beauty
literature and cognitive science
literature and the limits of sense
irony and ironism
literature and self-fashioning
intention and interpretation
metaphor
mimesis and make-believe
non-semantic effects of literary texts
literature and moral improvement
styles and genres of philosophical writing

For representative writings and links by Stanford and non-Stanford writers alike, please browse our library. Here are a few books by affiliated Stanford authors:

Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality