This seminar brings together new work in the field of literature and philosophy on the topic of thinking. It looks to works of literature and art to deepen our conception of what thinking is and what counts as understanding and knowledge in the world. Traditionally, this has been an unlikely place to look—for the task of thinking, historically, has belonged to the philosophers. How, then, do we reevaluate the ancient quarrel today? How do we, accordingly, describe the kinds of insights that literature and art afford? 

In essence, this seminar takes up classic philosophical questions about how fictional and imaginative works come to touch what is worldbound, but it is interested in approaching these questions in new, dynamic, and creative ways. How do poems contain truths? In what way is a novel a way of thinking about something? What do we learn—about others, about the world, about ourselves—from a play or photograph or film? These questions feel increasingly urgent in a time when the authority of knowing is reserved almost entirely for science, data, and other forms of “realist” thinking or “nonfiction.” The emphasis in this seminar, in response, lies on thinking with literature and art rather than about them. Instead of uncovering the dynamics of human cognition, the seminar highlights modes of reading that grant literature and art the authority of insight. 

Papers in this seminar might take a number of forms. Case studies of thinking in literature and the arts are welcome, as are treatments of canonical or contemporary philosophers reading concrete works of art. Like Stanley Cavell’s understanding of film as a philosophical domain, papers in this seminar similarly might attend to questions of medium or genre in relation to philosophical possibilities. Presentations might also interrogate the role that thought and knowledge have played in the history of aesthetic theory. Most of all, papers are encouraged that bring out the complex and diverse claims that literature and art make to thinking. 

Please direct questions and comments to Magdalena Ostas at [email protected].