Project MUSE®: Philosophy and Literature - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Philosophy and Literature.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1976) through current issueLatest Articles: Philosophy and LiteratureTWOProject MUSE®Philosophy and Literature1086-329X0190-0013Latest articles in Philosophy and Literature. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Race in Context: Ordinary Language and Nella Larsen’s Passing
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981181
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Since the 1970s, literary critics have studied the work of Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen for its complex and often ambiguous representations of life along the color line in 1920s Harlem, where race is always imbricated with sex and class.1 Larsen’s second (and last) novel, Passing (1929), represents not only the tenuous construction of identities but also the tantalizing possibility of eliminating race concepts altogether. Passing centers on Irene Redfield, a light-skinned African American woman who can (and does) pass for white when she’s alone. Although Irene sometimes seems ambivalent about her race, she identifies as Black and appears to be an exemplary “race woman.” She aspires to be the perfect
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallRace in Context: Ordinary Language and Nella Larsen’s Passing2026-02-01text/htmlen-USRace in Context: Ordinary Language and Nella Larsen’s Passing2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®739102026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01What Is the Tragedy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981182
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Although often accepted unreflectively at face value, it can be puzzling why Friedrich Nietzsche conceived of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a tragedy. The main character, Zarathustra, is neither disgraced, discredited, nor degraded at the end of the book. During the narrative he periodically experiences physical suffering as an effect of his psychological, soul-searching distress, but as for his relationships with others, no one ever inflicts serious bodily harm upon him. He sometimes loses confidence in himself, often feels alone, sometimes weeps bitterly, is laughed at upon occasion, and is verbally threatened, but he copes with these episodes effectively and moves on. After a course of personal development (as one
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallWhat Is the Tragedy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra?2026-02-01text/htmlen-USWhat Is the Tragedy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra?2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®765772026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Philosophy of Literary Cognition
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981183
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Literary cognition comprises the processes of mind that make sense of literature. The currently regnant doctrine within literary scholarship approaches such mentation as a form of interpretation, for which the many branches of literary theory (cultural studies, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, etc.) provide variegated interpretive guidance. Each of these, and the discipline overall, gets the preponderance of its assumptions about interpretation from a picture of language and meaning propounded by poststructuralism, a school of thought largely derived from a structuralism rooted in Ferdinand de Saussure’s century-old linguistics. Within his own discipline, however, Saussure’s linguistics have
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallPhilosophy of Literary Cognition2026-02-01text/htmlen-USPhilosophy of Literary Cognition2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®695862026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Absolute Skepticism in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981184
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It is only of our easy faith, that we are not infidels throughout; and only of our lack of faith, that we believe what we do. In some universe-old truths, all mankind are disbelievers.In his extant letters to friend and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, author Herman Melville returns often to the subject of truth—particularly the difficulties of discerning it and the apathy of society toward it. “The tragicalness of human thought,” Melville writes him in 1851, lies in how little interested humanity seems to be in knowing what is true: “Try to get a living by the Truth—and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallAbsolute Skepticism in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man2026-02-01text/htmlen-USAbsolute Skepticism in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®764322026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01On Beauty, Balanchine, and Farrell: Platonic Modernism on the New York Dance Stage
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981185
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In October 1963, eighteen-year-old Suzanne Farrell, née Roberta Sue Ficker, received a letter from choreographer George Balanchine postmarked Hamburg, Germany, where he was collaborating on a production of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice.1 Farrell, a recent transplant from Cincinnati, was a dancer in the corps of the New York City Ballet, the company Balanchine had founded in 1948 to advance his art form and foster an appreciation of artistic beauty in the American public more broadly.2 With that letter, Farrell was flung into his ambitious project entirely unaware of the major part she would play in its development. Balanchine had a new ballet in mind, the first he would make especially for her
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallOn Beauty, Balanchine, and Farrell: Platonic Modernism on the New York Dance Stage2026-02-01text/htmlen-USOn Beauty, Balanchine, and Farrell: Platonic Modernism on the New York Dance Stage2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®631942026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Eclipse of the Political: Private Passions and the Distorting Love of Honor in Much Ado About Nothing
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981186
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All there is to thinking . . . is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.1In Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare stages for his audience a passion play framed as a comedy. A bitter villain contrives the destruction of virtue and love through the death of an innocent, and his villainy is aided and abetted by a few good men who love honor, and in its name unwittingly allow themselves to be foolishly duped by appearances. Alongside this action, other lovers of honor enact a parallel passion play, in which those who deny the power of love and spurn marriage find themselves ensnared against their wills in a net woven
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallEclipse of the Political: Private Passions and the Distorting Love of Honor in Much Ado About Nothing2026-02-01text/htmlen-USEclipse of the Political: Private Passions and the Distorting Love of Honor in Much Ado About Nothing2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®513482026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01“Signifying Nothing”: Shakespeare’s Cascading Nihilism in Macbeth
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981187
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Whoever thinks that Shakespeare’s theatre has a moral effect, and that the sight of Macbeth irresistibly repels one from the evil of ambition, is in error: and he is again in error if he thinks Shakespeare himself felt as he feels.It sometimes seems to me that the whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare.Macbeth is a useful text for the study of nihilism as it offers an opportunity to explore how a nihilist polity of a certain kind would operate. Macbeth’s transition from loyal Thane of Glamis to deposed nihilist tyrant of Scotland is illustrative of a number of tensions regarding the theorization of modern politics during the humanist era (of which William Shakespeare was a notable product)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmall“Signifying Nothing”: Shakespeare’s Cascading Nihilism in Macbeth2026-02-01text/htmlen-US“Signifying Nothing”: Shakespeare’s Cascading Nihilism in Macbeth2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®575542026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Stigma as Drama: From Shakespeare to Sociology and Back
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981188
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William Shakespeare, sixteenth-century English playwright, and Erving Goffman, twentieth-century Canadian American sociologist, are often seen as kindred spirits because both believed what Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It:The idea of the theatrum mundi, “the theater of the world” or “the world as theater,” is as old as theater itself.2 The sign on Shakespeare’s theater, The Globe, was said to have the motto totus mundus agit histrionem, “all the globe’s a stage,” though that story is now seen as spurious.3 For his part, Goffman used theater as a metaphor for social interaction and a vocabulary for sociological analysis. He saw people as actors. Just as an actor plays different roles in different plays, a person
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallStigma as Drama: From Shakespeare to Sociology and Back2026-02-01text/htmlen-USStigma as Drama: From Shakespeare to Sociology and Back2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®965422026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Macbeth and the Freedom of the Will
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981189
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The main character of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth1—Macbeth himself—is quite intriguing. Although he is (in some sense) manipulated by the witches, it is hard not to consider him guilty of the horrible crimes he commits. I want to argue that, for this very reason, Macbeth provides an excellent (thought experiment–like) argument in favor of compatibilism (the thesis that determinism and free will are compatible).The following inference helps articulate the puzzlement caused by Macbeth’s actions:P1. Macbeth is not the ultimate source of his actions and he could not have done otherwise;P2. If Macbeth is not the ultimate source of his actions and could not have done otherwise, then Macbeth did not act freely;P3. If a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallMacbeth and the Freedom of the Will2026-02-01text/htmlen-USMacbeth and the Freedom of the Will2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®231252026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01The Art of Blame: Hume on Insult and Satire
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981190
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David Hume’s remarks about insult and satire in book 1 of the Treatise of Human Nature1 can be developed by exploring his later work on emotion in the essay “Of Tragedy.”2 In the Treatise, Hume maintains that insult and satire can deliver identical criticisms and blame while eliciting distinct emotional reactions from their respective targets. Material on the interaction of discordant emotions from “Of Tragedy” can be brought to bear on an exploration of the way in which amusement, aroused by a satirical presentation, may transfigure blame in such a way as to diminish or defuse indignation.Quite unexpectedly, in the course of Hume’s discussion of unphilosophical probability in book 1 of the Treatise (T 1.3.13.1–20
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallThe Art of Blame: Hume on Insult and Satire2026-02-01text/htmlen-USThe Art of Blame: Hume on Insult and Satire2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®365762026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Clichés and Literary Value
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981191
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How we use words reflects how we think, and we can find no worse way of thinking than in cliché. So the story goes. A cliché betrays not just a lack of originality but a lack of care. Writing that relies on clichés is lazy, and, to quote one critic, “Lazy writing is lazy thinking.” This idea has become ubiquitous. One finds it in scathing reviews of bestsellers, blog posts about Hollywood blockbusters, political treatises on soft power. “Lazy writing is lazy thinking.” Or to put it more colorfully: “Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” The second of these quotations comes from George
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallClichés and Literary Value2026-02-01text/htmlen-USClichés and Literary Value2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®963232026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01“To Say Just What I Mean”: The Composition of the Self in T. S. Eliot’s Early Poetry
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981192
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J. Alfred Prufrock, one of T. S. Eliot’s enduring literary figures, is one among many in his early poetry whose self-obsessed inertia has been commonly read as a symptom of modern alienation. Like many of his counterparts in Eliot’s early poetry, Prufrock wanders through the city streets alone, sequestered from the drawing room where “women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.”1 The discussion of Michelangelo denotes a socioculturally specific space, the strictures of which Prufrock chafes against throughout the poem.Eliot’s correspondences at the time reveal that these early poems were, in part, attempts at representing his own alienating experiences of living in London. In a letter to Conrad Aiken in 1914
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmall“To Say Just What I Mean”: The Composition of the Self in T. S. Eliot’s Early Poetry2026-02-01text/htmlen-US“To Say Just What I Mean”: The Composition of the Self in T. S. Eliot’s Early Poetry2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®548322026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01The Insurmountable Privacy of Thought
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981193
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There is an interesting sense of the term “private language” in which I think—and I think Ludwig Wittgenstein thinks—that private language exists. That is the main thesis I want to argue for in this paper. I will also attempt to show that Gottlob Frege anticipated this conception of private language, and that Plato and Socrates had already thought about the same problem, albeit in rather different terms. In contrast with the better-known conception of private language in Wittgenstein’s work, which derives from a supposed privacy of sensation, the alternative conception highlighted in this paper concerns a certain privacy of thought, namely the privacy of thought that arises from the complexity of the objects of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallThe Insurmountable Privacy of Thought2026-02-01text/htmlen-USThe Insurmountable Privacy of Thought2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®918592026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Epistemology and Logic: Two Poems
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981194
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Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallEpistemology and Logic: Two Poems2026-02-01text/htmlen-USEpistemology and Logic: Two Poems2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®44092026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01A Cave Allegory
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981195
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The philosopher was born under the sun—much as the rest of us. But while others moved about in the light of day, more or less content with the beauty and clarity of things before them, dealing with the myriad events of life as they come, the philosopher found himself continuously puzzled. “What are the natures of these things before me?—What is the essence that unifies them?—How can I make sense of it all in simpler and more definite terms? This world of light contains many shadows where nature hides itself and many reflections so brilliant they are blinding —how can I so much as proceed in a world that is unfit even for eyes?” And so the philosopher, with a handful of curious followers, descended into a cave
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallA Cave Allegory2026-02-01text/htmlen-USA Cave Allegory2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®22042026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01Lionel Trilling and the Importance of Returning Serve
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981196
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In his book Concealment and Exposure, Thomas Nagel includes a commentary that originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) in the summer of 1998, as impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton gathered momentum. In the essay, entitled “The Shredding of Public Privacy,” Nagel laments the “disastrous erosion of the precious but fragile conventions of personal privacy” over the course of recent decades and pleads for Clinton to be spared any further probing into his private life.1 In the course of his remarks, Nagel expresses regret for his own support, seven years earlier, of a similar probe into the private life of Clarence Thomas when he was nominated for the US Supreme Court. Critic James
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/158/image/coversmallLionel Trilling and the Importance of Returning Serve2026-02-01text/htmlen-USLionel Trilling and the Importance of Returning Serve2026-02-012026TWOProject MUSE®859552026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-01