Philosophy and Literature

Jukka Mikkonen
Philosophy of Literature (review)
Philosophy and Literature - Volume 33, Number 1, April 2009, pp. 224-227

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Project MUSE - Philosophy and Literature - Philosophy of Literature (review) Project MUSE Journals Philosophy and Literature Volume 33, Number 1, April 2009 Philosophy of Literature (review) Philosophy and Literature Volume 33, Number 1, April 2009 E-ISSN: 1086-329X Print ISSN: 0190-0013 DOI: 10.1353/phl.0.0032 Reviewed by Jukka MikkonenUniversity of Tampere, Finland Philosophy of Literature, by Peter Lamarque; x & 329 pp. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. $34.95 paper, $84.95 hardback. Even to this day, analytic philosophical approaches to literature have a bad reputation among some literary critics and aestheticians from other philosophical traditions. This is largely due to analytic philosophers of language and metaphysics who often have done excursions into literary fiction simply to illustrate their theories of language and reality -- for example, Bertrand Russell's interest in Hamlet as a group of false sentences. Fortunately, another group of analytic philosophers is interested in literature as an art form, one of them being Peter Lamarque. Over decades, Lamarque has immersed himself in studying the central issues in the philosophy of literature, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that he is perhaps the most prominent contemporary scholar in the field. Philosophy of Literature is divided into seven chapters covering ambitious subject areas: Art, Literature, Authors, Practice, Fiction, Truth, and Value. The main questions the book attempts to answer...