Wolfgang Huemer

Anti-cognitivism is best understood as a challenge to explain how works of fi ctional narrative can add to our worldly knowledge. One way to respond to this challenge is to argue that works of fi ctional narrative add to our knowledge by inviting us to explore, in the imagination, the perspectives or points of view of others. In the present paper, I distinguish two readings of this thesis that refl ect two very different conceptions of "perspective": a fi rst understanding focuses on what the world looks like from a subjective point of view. Within this framework, we can distinguish approaches that focus on the subjective character of experience from others that explore the nature of subjectivity. I will argue that both strands can be successful only if they acknowledge the de se character of imagining. The second conception understands perspective as a method of representing. To illustrate it, I will look back to the invention of linear perspective in Renaissance painting. I will argue that the defi nition of perspective as a rule-guided method or technique can shed new light on the thesis that works of narrative fi ction are particularly suited to display other perspectives.

Anti-cognitivism is best understood as a challenge to explain how works of fictional narrative can add to our worldly knowledge. One way to respond to this challenge is to argue that works of fictional narrative add to our knowledge by inviting us to explore, in the imagination, the perspectives or points of view of others. In the present paper, I distinguish two readings of this thesis that reflect two very different conceptions of “perspective”: a first understanding focuses on what the world looks like from a subjective point of view. Within this framework, we can distinguish approaches that focus on the subjective character of experience from others that explore the nature of subjectivity. I will argue that both strands can be successful only if they acknowledge the de se character of imagining. The second conception understands perspective as a method of representing. To illustrate it, I will look back to the invention of linear perspective in Renaissance painting. I will argue...

Walton's account of make-believe takes the social dimension of imagination into account. In this paper I aim to extend this suggestion and argue that works of fiction allow for encounters with concrete (yet fictitious) persons with a distinct point of view and a discernible perspective. These encounters allow us to contrast the perspective(s) that emerge from the work with one's own. I will then discuss two moments of the social dimension: imagining fictional scenarios is a social practice, a game we play together and in which we encounter others. Both of these moments shed light on the central role of fiction for the social community in which it is embedded and show how engaging with works of fiction can contribute to the inner cohesion and to the persistence of the group.

Walton's account of make-believe takes the social dimension of imagination into account. In this paper I aim to extend this suggestion and argue that works of fiction allow for encounters with concrete (yet fictitious) persons with a distinct point of view and a discernible perspective. These encounters allow us to contrast the perspective(s) that emerge from the work with one's own. I will then discuss two moments of the social dimension: imagining fictional scenarios is a social practice, a game we play together and in which we encounter others. Both of these moments shed light on the central role of fiction for the social community in which it is embedded and show how engaging with works of fiction can contribute to the inner cohesion and to the persistence of the group.

I address the question of whether naturalism can provide adequate means for the scientific study of rules and rule-following behavior. As the term "naturalism" is used in many different ways in the contemporary debate, I will first spell out which version of naturalism I am targeting. Then I will recall a classical argument against naturalism in a version presented by Husserl. In the main part of the paper I will sketch a conception of rule-following behavior that is influenced by Sellars and Haugeland. I will argue that rule-following is an essential part of human nature and insist in the social dimension of rules. Moreover, I will focus on the often overlooked fact that genuine rule-following behavior requires resilience and presupposes an inclination to calibrate one's own behavior to that of the other members of the community. Rule-following, I will argue, is possible only for social creatures who follow shared rules, which in turn presupposes a shared (first-person plural) perspective. This implies, however, that our scientific understanding of human nature has to remain incomplete as long as it does not take this perspective, which prima facie seems alien to it, into account

The creation of new institutions and the initiation of new forms of behaviour cannot be explained only on the basis of constitutive rules – they also require a broader commitment of individuals who participate in social practices and, thus, to become members of a community. In this paper, I argue that the received conception of constitutive rules shows a problematic intellectualistic bias that becomes particularly manifest in three assumptions: (i) constitutive rules have a logical form, (ii) constitutive rules have no normative force, and (iii) rules are essentially tied to a sanctioning authority. I discuss these three claims in light of real-life examples. The goal of this discussion is to show that the normative force of constitutive rules is based on the shared commitment of participants who engage in the relevant practices. The inner cohesion and the persistence in time of these practices is possible only because participants continuously calibrate their own forms of behaviour to that of the other members of the community, which underscores the social dimension of constitution.

Brentano's position in the history of philosophy is often illustrated by the long list of important philosophers who have studied with him. Yet, the relations between Brentano and his students were not always without friction. In the present article I argue that Brentano's students were most attracted by his conception of a scientific philosophy, which promised to leave the received tradition (German Idealism) behind and to mark the beginning of a new period in the history of philosophy-a project they were happy to be part of. Brentano's work remained in an important sense fragmentary, however, and could, thus, not provide the inner unity that would have been essential for forming a compact school or a unified philosophical movement.

What do we see in a mirror? There is an ongoing debate whether mirrors present us with images of objects or whether we see, through the mirror, the objects themselves. Roberto Casati has recently argued that there is a categorical difference between images and mirror-reflections. His argument depends on the observation that mirrors, but not paintings, are sensitive to changes in the observer's prospective. In our paper we scrutinize Casati's argument and present a modal argument that shows that it cannot establish this conclusion. We suggest that Casati's line of reasoning suffers from the fact that he does not take dynamic images, i.e., images that change over time, into account.

What do we see in a mirror? There is an ongoing debate over whether mirrors present us with images of objects or whether we see, through the mirror, the objects themselves. Roberto Casati has recently argued that there is a categorical difference between images and mirror reflections. His argument depends on the observation that mirrors, but not paintings, are sensitive to changes in the observer’s perspective. In our paper we scrutinize Casati’s argument and present a modal argument that shows that it cannot establish this conclusion. We suggest that Casati’s line of reasoning suffers from the fact that he does not take dynamic images – that is, images that change over time – into account.

In this chapter, Huemer argues that the strong fascination Wittgenstein had for artists cannot be explained primarily by the content of his work, and in particular not by his sporadic observation on aesthetics, but rather by stylistic features of his work’s and formal aspects of his writing. Eduardo Paolozzi’s testimony shows that artists often had a feeling of acquaintance or familiarity with the philosopher, which—it is suggested—is due to stylistic features of his work, such as the colloquial tone in which Wittgenstein shares his observations with the reader, but also the lack of long-winded arguments or explanations. In the concluding part, Huemer suggests that we can read Wittgenstein’s writings as artworks of a specific kind: as philosophical works of art.

In this article I argue that the strong fascination that Wittgenstein has had for artists cannot be explained primarily by the content of his work, and in particular not by his sporadic observation on aesthetics, but rather by stylistic features of his work formal aspects of his writing. Edoardo Paolozzi's testimony shows that artists often had a feeling of acquaintance or familiarity with the philosopher, which I think is due to stylistic features of his work, such as the colloquial tone in which Wittgenstein shares his observation with the reader, but also the lack of long-winded arguments or explanations. In the concluding part I suggest that we can read Wittgenstein's artworks of a specific kind: as philosophical works of art.

The history of philosophy of the twentieth century can be best characterized, it has been argued, by the opposition between two of its main movements, phenomenology and analytic philosophy. This strategy seems appropriate since both movements have their beginnings around the turn of the century, and most philosophical positions after the Second World War have their roots in one of the two movements. In addition, there was not much contact between the two movements, but there were exceptions. In this paper I will discuss one of the earliest attempts to actively combine the results of Husserlian phenomenology with the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle, which was proposed by Felix Kaufmann in a number of articles he published in the early forties. In the last two or three decades an increasing number of philosophers have pointed out that there are important parallels between Husserlian phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Peter Simons, for example, states that the divide between the two traditions “did not exist at the turn of the century and only became clearly apparent after the Second World War.” 1 Similarly Michael Dummett, who mentions in his History of Analytical Philosophy that to a German student of philosophy in 1903 – i.e., two years after the publication of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, where he first developed his phenomenological project – Husserl and Frege must have appeared “[n]ot, certainly, as two deeply opposed thinkers: rather as remarkably close in orientation, despite some divergence of interests.”2 In fact, there are considerable parallels in the positions of the two philosophers, who had exchanged letters and sent each other their publications as early as the 1890s. In addition, Frege reviewed Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic, criticizing his project of developing a psychological foundation of logic which, in turn, was one of the factors that convinced Husserl that this project was doomed3 and to develop his critique of psychologism in the Logical Investigations, where he distinguished normative from pure logic, the latter being about ideal (logical) objects. Moreover, it was this ontological move of accepting the existence of ideal objects that allowed Husserl to further develop Franz Brentano’s method of descriptive psychology into his own phenomenological

In a series of recent contributions it has been argued that Franz Brentano’s philosophical position constituted a unified system; Uriah Kriegel has called Brentano's philosophy as “the last grand system of Western philosophy”. The goal of the present paper is to scrutinise this claim and shed light on Brentano's methodological approach and his style of reasoning. I pay particular attention to two aspects: Brentano’s view that philosophy should be done in a rigorous, scientific manner and the fragmentary character of Brentano’s work. I argue that both aspects stand in contrast to the very idea of system-philosophy: the maxim that philosophy should adopt the method of the natural sciences was intended by Brentano as a way of distancing himself from system-philosophy; while the fragmentary character of Brentano’s work does not fulfill the aspiration of system-philosophy to provide an answer to everything. Yet, the incompleteness of his work is not an arbitrary or contingent aspect; it is rather a necessary side-effect of his methodological views.

I address the question of whether naturalism can provide adequate means for the scientific study of rules and rule-following behavior. As the term “naturalism” is used in many different ways in the contemporary debate, I will first spell out which version of naturalism I am targeting. Then I will recall a classical argument against naturalism in a version presented by Husserl. In the main part of the paper, I will sketch a conception of rule-following behavior that is influenced by Sellars and Haugeland. I will argue that rule-following is an essential part of human nature and insist in the social dimension of rules. Moreover, I will focus on the often overlooked fact that genuine rule-following behavior requires resilience and presupposes an inclination to calibrate one’s own behavior to that of the other members of the community. Rule-following, I will argue, is possible only for social creatures who follow shared rules, which in turn presupposes a shared (first-person plural) per...

Anti-reductionist philosophers have often argued that mental and linguistic phenomena contain an intrinsically normative element that cannot be captured by the natural sciences which focus on causal rather than rational relations. This line of reasoning raises the questions of how reasons could evolve in a world of causes and how children can be acculturated to participate in rule-governed social practices. In this paper I will sketch a Wittgensteinian answer to these questions. I will first point out that throughout his later philosophy Wittgenstein draws a sharp distinction between "teaching" and "training": newly-born children are (conditioned) to react to specific stimuli in specific ways, which then allows them to acquire concepts and follow rules. I will then show that this picture presupposes a strong analogy between concepts and capacities, which is also present in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. In the last section I will point out that Wittgenstein...

In this article we present and compare two early attempts to establish psychology as an independent scientific discipline that had considerable influence in central Europe: the theories of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776—1841) and Franz Brentano (1838—1917). While both of them emphasize that psychology ought to be conceived as an empirical science, their conceptions show revealing differences. Herbart starts with metaphysical principles and aims at mathematizing psychology, whereas Brentano rejects all metaphysics and bases his method on a conception of inner perception (as opposed to inner observation) as a secondary consciousness, by means of which one gets to be aware of all of one’s own conscious phenomena. Brentano’s focus on inner perception brings him to deny the claim that there could be unconscious mental phenomena — a view that stands in sharp contrast to Herbart’s emphasis on unconscious, ‘repressed’ presentations as a core element of his mechanics of mind. Herbart, on the...

In December 1906 Hugo von Hofmannsthal made a conference tour through Germany, reading his paper “The Poet and this Time.”1 On December 6 he was in Göttingen where he visited a distant relative, Malvine Husserl2 (née Steinschneider), and her husband Edmund ...

In a series of recent contributions it has been argued that Franz Brentano’s philosophical position constituted a unified system; Uriah Kriegel has called Brentano's philosophy as “the last grand system of Western philosophy”. The goal of the present paper is to scrutinise this claim and shed light on Brentano's methodological approach and his style of reasoning. I pay particular attention to two aspects: Brentano’s view that philosophy should be done in a rigorous, scientific manner and the fragmentary character of Brentano’s work. I argue that both aspects stand in contrast to the very idea of system-philosophy: the maxim that philosophy should adopt the method of the natural sciences was intended by Brentano as a way of distancing himself from system-philosophy; while the fragmentary character of Brentano’s work does not fulfill the aspiration of system-philosophy to provide an answer to everything. Yet, the incompleteness of his work is not an arbitrary or contingent aspect; it is rather a necessary side-effect of his methodological views.

I address the question of whether naturalism can provide adequate means for the scientific study of rules and rule-following behavior. As the term "naturalism" is used in many different ways in the contemporary debate, I will first spell out which version of naturalism I am targeting. Then I will recall a classical argument against naturalism in a version presented by Husserl. In the main part of the paper I will sketch a conception of rule-following behavior that is influenced by Sellars and Haugeland. I will argue that rule-following is an essential part of human nature and insist in the social dimension of rules. Moreover, I will focus on the often overlooked fact that genuine rule-following behavior requires resilience and presupposes an inclination to calibrate one's own behavior to that of the other members of the community. Rule-following, I will argue, is possible only for social creatures who follow shared rules, which in turn presupposes a shared (first-person plural) perspective. This implies, however, that our scientific understanding of human nature has to remain incomplete as long as it does not take this perspective, which prima facie seems alien to it, into account.

Among historians of philosophy it is often taken for granted that the "Brentano school" was one of the influential philosophical movements at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century-but Brentano's own contributions are often eclipsed by that of his direct students. This invites to reflect on the nature of and the unity within the school. Since Brentano's conception of a rigorous, scientific philosophy had a strong impact on his students, it has been argued that this conception constitutes a unifying element in an otherwise heterogeneous group. The scope of this article is to shed light on this thesis and to show its limits. I argue for a differentiated view: the Brentano school is best seen not as a compact movement, but as a heterogeneous group of scholars who approached, in a given historical and geographical period, similar topics in very similar ways.

The contemporary debate in the philosophy of literature is strongly shaped by the anti-cognitivist challenge, according to which works of literary fiction (that contain propositions that are neither literally true nor affirmed by the author) cannot impart (relevant) knowledge to the readers or enrich their worldly understanding. Anti-cognitivists appreciate works of literary fiction for their aesthetic values and so risk to reduce them to mere ornaments that are entertaining, but eventually useless. Many philosophers have reacted to this challenge by pointing at ways in which works of literary fiction can be informative even though they lack worldly reference: it has been argued, for example, that works of fictions are thought experiments; that they add not to our theoretical knowledge, but to our know-how or to our phenomenal knowledge; or that that they help readers to understand the perspectives of others. A stubborn defense of literary cognitivism, however, risks to collapse into an instrumental understanding of literature. In my paper I suggest that both sides in the debate focus too narrowly on semantic features of the works in question that is tied to what I will call the " referential picture " of language. A shift perspective is needed: for one, we ought to fully appreciate that the term " literature " does not refer to a homogeneous phenomenon, but rather to a very heterogeneous and multifarious set of works that are read by many different readers for many different reasons in many different ways. Second, we need to understand that these works have in common much more than the semantic peculiarity of lacking worldly reference: they are a unique means of communication between authors and readers – and in particular the role of the latter is often neglected in contemporary debate. These two points should help us to get a more comprehensive understanding of the practice of literature and the vast range of values we can find works of literary fiction – and the interplay between them.

Abstract: Brentano’s conception of scientific philosophy had a strong influence on his students and on the intellectual atmosphere of Vienna in the late nineteenth century. The aim of this article is to expose Brentano’s conception and to contrast his views with that of two traditions he is said to have considerably influenced: phenomenology and analytic philosophy. I will shed light on the question of how and to what extent Brentano’s conception of philosophy as a rigorous science has had an impact on these two traditions. The discussion will show that both took their liberties in the interpretation of the thesis, a move that allowed them to liberate themselves from Brentano’s inheritance and to fully develop their own philosophical positions.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on William Shakespeare, though small in number, have
raised a considerable amount of interest and bewilderment among scholars. The few
observations, all of which are contained in posthumously published Notebooks, express a distanced attitude not only towards the Bard but also towards the culture to which the
latter belongs. Wittgenstein does not, however, embed Shakespeare’s work in a larger
context, nor does he make any effort to explain or justify his judgment, which might be
due to the diaristic character of the notebooks in which they are contained. It should,
therefore, not come as a surprise that they have been interpreted in very different
and mutually incompatible ways. Some interpreters have suggested that they display a
misreading of Shakespeare’s work; others have argued that they reveal more about
Wittgenstein, his aesthetic judgement, or his philosophical agenda than the significance or the literary quality of Shakespeare’s work. In this article,  I first expose Wittgenstein’s remarks and then focus on the ambivalent reactions they have evoked among scholars.

Die Beziehung zwischen Philosophie und Literatur war seit jeher sehr eng und vielschichtig, oftmals bereichernd, zuweilen auch angespannt. In den letzten Jahrzehnten hat das theoretische Interesse, das Philosophinnen und Philosophen – vor allem aus den Reihen der analytischen Philosophie – der Literatur entgegenbringen, stark zugenommen, was die Anzahl der jüngst vor allem im englischen Sprachraum erschienen Handbücher, Einführungen und Anthologien eindrucksvoll belegt. Eine besondere Anziehungskraft könnte hier der Stoff bilden, aus dem literarische Kunstwerke geschaffen sind: Denn die Sprache ist das Medium nicht nur der Literatur, sondern auch der Philosophie – und darüber hinaus auch Gegenstand philosophischer Reflexion. So überrascht es nicht, dass sich die Philosophie dem Phänomen „Literatur“ nicht unbelastet nähert. Die Versuchung ist groß, Kategorien und Erklärungsansätze, die in der philosophischen Analyse der Sprache relevant erscheinen, auf die Sprache der Literatur zu übertragen. Die Konsequenzen dieses argumentativen Kurzschlusses sind zweierlei. Zum einen bieten viele Beiträge zur Philosophie der Literatur wenig Aufschlüsse über das Phänomen „Literatur“ oder über literarische Kunstwerke. Wo man ein differenziertes Gemälde komplexer Landschaften erwartet, findet man oft nur sehr grobe Skizzen, die mit wenigen Linien hingeworfen sind. Wer auf Anregungen hofft, die die eigene Lese-Erfahrung bereichern oder reflektieren könnten, wird enttäuscht. Zum anderen werden wir in der Philosophie der Literatur mit Problemstellungen konfrontiert, die Leserinnen und Lesern, die ein genuines Interesse für Literatur haben, wohl eher fremd anmuten müssen. Stellen wir bei der Lektüre von Tolstois Roman jemals ernsthaft infrage, ob wir tatsächlich Mitleid für Anna Karenina empfinden können? Kommen uns im Theater jemals Zweifel, ob die Begeisterung über eine gelungene Inszenierung von Shakespeares Hamlet angesichts der tragischen Wende des Stückes ange-

Die Philosophie der Wahrnehmung der letzten Jahrzehnte ist stark gepragt von der Begrifflichkeitsdebatte. Dabei ist allerdings eine dialektische Pattstellung zu erkennen: wahrend die Begrifflichkeitsthese fur gewohnlich mit der epistemischen Rolle er Wahrnehmung begrundet wird, verweisen Argumente fur die Nichtbegrifflichkeitsthese zumeist auf die qualitative Reichhaltigkeit und die erlebnismasig gegebenen, also phanomenologischen Aspekte der Wahrnehmung. Um diese Pattstellung zu uberwinden, skizziere ich in diesem Beitrag Uberlegungen fur ein Argument fur die Begrifflichkeitsthese, das wesentliche auf den phanomenologischen Aspekten der Wahrnehmung beruht.

Wahrnehmungserlebnisse haben einen besonderen Stellenwert in der Philo-sophie des Geistes. Zum einen stehen sie in einer kausalen Beziehung zum wahrgenommenen Gegenstand, die mit Hilfe der Gesetze der Naturwissen-schaften, vor allem der Physik ...

Der Artikel stellt verschiedene Verbindungen zwischen Wittgenstein und der Literatur bzw. der Philosophie der Literatur dar und gibt im zweiten Teil eine Einleitung zu den Artikeln des Sammelbandes "Wittgenstein und die Literatur" (hrsg. von John Gibson und Wolfgang Huemer, Suhrkamp 2006)

Literatur ist ein sehr vielschichtiges und lebendiges Phänomen, das beständig im Wandel ist. So wie sie im Laufe der Jahrhunderte und in den verschiedenen Kulturkreisen unter-schiedliche Formen angenommen und anderen Funktionen gedient hat, liegt es in ihrer Natur, immer wieder neue Ausdrucksformen zu entwickeln, die den sich ändernden Be-dürfnissen und Rahmenbedingungen gerecht werden können. Auch die theoretische Aus-einandersetzung mit der Literatur ist Veränderungen unterworfen, die manchmal wellen-förmige Bewegungen anzunehmen scheinen. Neue Fragestellungen geraten in den Mittel-punkt des Interesses, einzelne Aspekte werden besonders beachtet, während andere in Vergessenheit geraten – um eventuell zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt in neuer Form wieder-aufzutauchen.
In der Philosophie der Literatur gilt es seit Längerem als weithin anerkannt, dass der Text die entscheidende Größe sei, und dass die Tatsache, dass an der Produktion und Rezeption von literarischen Kunstwerken Menschen beteiligt sind, die mit diesen Werken Ziele verfolgen und Wünsche und Interessen verwirklichen wollen, ignoriert werden kön-ne. Im vorliegenden Beitrag will ich auf die gegenwärtige Diskussion in der Philosophie der Literatur eingehen und für einen Perspektivenwechsel argumentieren: Um dem Phä-nomen Literatur gerecht zu werden, sollten wir versuchen, es ganzheitlich in das Blickfeld zu bekommen. Literatur ist mehr als bloß Text. Sie ist eine soziale Praxis, die einen festen Stellenwert in unserer Gesellschaft hat und stellt ein Medium dar, in dem wir uns mit an-deren austauschen und auf sie abstimmen können. Mein Hauptaugenmerk liegt auf der Debatte um den kognitiven Gehalt der Literatur, weil hier die negativen Auswirkungen der Verkürzung der vorherrschenden Perspektive besonders augenscheinlich sind.

Der Artikel stellt verschiedene Verbindungen zwischen Wittgenstein und der Literatur bzw. der Philosophie der Literatur dar und gibt im zweiten Teil eine Einleitung zu den Artikeln des Sammelbandes "Wittgenstein und die Literatur" (hrsg. von John Gibson und Wolfgang Huemer, Suhrkamp 2006)

Brentano hat das Zeit-Problem in verschiedenen Phasen seiner Philosophie aus verschiedenen Perspektiven zu lösen gesucht, die in vier Phasen eingeteilt werden können: Erstens die frühe Würzburger Phase, in der er die Zeitdifferenzen in der Weise des urteilenden Verhaltens sieht; zweitens die frühe Wiener Phase, in der er besonderes Augenmerk auf die zeitlichen Unterschiede als Unterschiede des Gegenstandes legt, aber diese seine Auffassung des kontinuierlichen Zeitüberganges auch einer 3-fachen Kritik unterzieht, drittens die Charakterisierung der Zeitunterschiede als Unterschiede des Urteilsmodus; viertens die Auffassung der zeitlichen Unterschiede als Unterschiede des Vorstellens.

In this contribution I argue against the tendency to explain aesthetic values on the basis of neurophysiological processes (and especially the activation of mirror neurons)  in the brains of recipients of artworks. I primarily focus on a recent proposal by Vittorio Gallese and David Freedberg and argue that their account can at best explain the nature of experience of some pictures (and their effectiveness as pictures) but not why these experiences should be classified as *aesthetic* experience (nor can they explain the effectiveness of art). The contribution is written in German.

"I poeti sono mentitori per professione"? Il valore cognitivo della letteratura - Fin dall’antichita esiste una tensione tra filosofia e letteratura, a cui David Hume ha dato voce dicendo che i poeti sono «mentitori per professione»: i testi letterari, in quanto opere di finzione che parlano di persone che non sono mai esistite e di eventi che non sono mai accaduti, non contengono proposizioni vere. Cio implica, pero, che essi sono privi di qualsiasi valore cognitivo. Questo articolo cerca di mostrare che tale atteggiamento anticognitivista si basa su una concezione errata del progresso cognitivo, che lo riduce a un accumulo di dati. Quando apprendiamo da un testo letterario, invece, e perche esso ci offre nuove prospettive, approfondisce la nostra comprensione o ci invita a riflettere e ad arrivare a conclusioni nostre.

There is an old tension between philosophy and literature that has been brought to the point by David Hume who stated that poets are «liars by profession». Literary texts, as works of fiction that talk about people who have never lived and events that have never taken place, do not contain true propositions and hence do not have any cognitive value. This article aims to show that the anticognitivistic argument is based on a false conception of cognitive progress, which reduces learning to the acquisition of information. We can learn from literary texts, however, because they offer new perspectives, deepen our understanding and invite us to reflect and arrive at our own conclusions.

Fin dall’antichità esiste una tensione tra filosofia e letteratura, a cui David Hume ha dato voce dicendo che i poeti sono «mentitori per professione»: i testi letterari, in quanto opere di finzione che parlano di persone che non sono mai esistite e di eventi che non sono mai accaduti, non contengono proposizioni vere. Ciò implica, però, che essi sono privi di qualsiasi valore cognitivo. Questo articolo cerca di mostrare che tale atteggiamento anticognitivista si basa su una concezione errata del progresso cognitivo, che lo riduce a un accumulo di dati. Quando apprendiamo da un testo letterario, invece, è perché esso ci offre nuove prospettive, approfondisce la nostra comprensione o ci invita a riflettere e ad arrivare a conclusioni nostre.

Introduction Part 1: Narrative as a Form of Knowing 1. Narration and Knowledge 2. The Ends of Narrative" "3. Problems of Holocaust Fiction" "4. The Truth about Stories is that that's All We Are" "5. Narrative and the Fulfillment of Knowledge Part 2: Fiction & Cognition 6. Learning from Literature " "Cognitive Functions of Fiction" "7. Poetry and Cognition 8. Fiction, Simulation, and Knowledge " "9. Nonsense, Logic, and Wishing" "10. Knowledge Across Fictional Worlds and Real Worlds " "11. Drawing Inferences from Literature" "Part 3: The Epistemology of Literary Appreciation 12. Myths and Legends 13. Interpretation, Emergence, and Insight " "14. En Abyme:Internal Models and Cognitive Mapping " "15. The Return of the Represses: Caring about Fiction and its Themes " "

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1. Philosophy as a Kind of Literature/Literature as a Kind of Philosophy Part 2. Reading with Wittgenstein Part 3. Literature and the Boundaries of Self and Sense Part 4. Fiction and the Tractatus Part 5. The Larger View

"With contributions from: Alex Burri, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, Richard Eldridge, John Gibson, Timothy Gould, James Guetti, Garry Hagberg, Bernard Harrison, Wolfgang Huemer, Dale Jaquette, Joseph Margolis, Marjorie Perloff, Rupert Read, David Schalkwyk, Joachim Schulte, Sonia Sedivy und Martin Stone.

German Translation: Wittgenstein und die Literatur (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2006)

Chinese Translation: 文人维特根斯坦. Shanghai: Sanhui Culture and Press, 2009."

... Roberto Poli, ed., The Brentano Puzzle Reviewed by. Wolfgang Huemer. Bookmark and Share. This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical 3.0 Unported license. Philosophy in Review ISSN 1206-5269 EISSN 1920-8936. ...

... Franz Brentano, Descriptive Psychology Reviewed by. Wolfgang Huemer. Bookmark and Share. This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical 3.0 Unported license. Philosophy in Review ISSN 1206-5269 EISSN 1920-8936. ...

... Edgar Morscher, ed., Bernard Bolzanos geistiges Erbe für das 21. Jahrhundert Reviewed by. Wolfgang Huemer. Bookmark and Share. This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical 3.0 Unported license. ...

At first glance, literature and philosophy seem to have a lot in common. Literary works of art - very much like philosophical essays - are intellectually stimulating and invite readers to reflect on issues that can become central for achieving a better understanding of one's own situation, the nature of interpersonal relations, the point of view of other people, the human nature, or (aspects of) our social and physical environment. Moreover, both use the same medium, language. Nonetheless, the relationship between the two has always been troublesome. When philosophers have turned their attention to literature, they have often voiced their reservations, reminding us that poets typically do not describe real people or events that have actually taken place. They rather aim at entertaining their readers by pulling them into fictional scenarios that are products of their imaginations. As a consequence, many philosophers have denied what ordinary people often just take for granted: literature can offer knowledge or insights about the actual world. The old questions of whether and, if so, how literature can impart knowledge to the reader have gained more and more attention in recent decades.

Mikkonen pursues two very different goals at the same time: he gives an overview of the recent debate concerning the cognitive value of literature and develops a position that he labels the moderate propositional theory of literary truth. As indicated in the title, Mikkonen does not focus on literature tout court, but restricts his argument to philosophical fiction, i.e., to fictional literature that systematically explores "fundamental issues related to, for example, ethics (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy), metaphysics and ontology (Borges), logic and language (Lewis Carroll), philosophical concepts, such as 'time' (Mann, Proust), and human existence (Sartre, Camus)" (9).

The arguments of anti-cognitivist philosophers are often based on the observation that there is a substantial difference between literary works of art and philosophical or scientific treatises. While the former perform mainly aesthetic functions, the latter contain arguments in support of a hypothesis that is formulated explicitly in the text and asserted by the author. According to this line of reasoning, scientific texts, but not literary ones, can offer justified, true propositions and so impart knowledge to the reader.

Rather than refusing this line of reasoning and challenging the conception of cognitive value on which it is based, Mikkonen tries to show that it is wrong. He argues that literary works of art offer propositional knowledge by asserting propositions of a special kind - he calls them literary assertions - that are not simply absorbed by the reader, but rather invite her to contemplate and reflect. Literary assertions typically are not explicitly stated in the text but communicated with the text: "the supporters of the moderate propositional theory maintain that a large part of the cognitive content of literature lies beneath its surface and that literary works may imply or suggest truths" (73). Moreover, even though literary texts do not contain arguments in the narrow sense, Mikkonen suggests that they do support their literary assertions or suggestions with a specific form of reasoning: they contain incomplete arguments or enthymemes. "Roughly speaking, a literary work persuades its readers of its truths enthymematically, by implying the deliberately omitted conclusion: the unstated part of the argument is suggested by the work and filled in by the reader" (88).

This brings Mikkonen to reconsider the role of the author's intentions, counterbalancing the widespread tendency to bracket the (actual) author's intentions in the reading of a work. If there is an assertion that emerges from a literary text, he argues, it cannot be attributed to the narrator or the implied author, for they do not really exist but are constructs or fictional entities, whereas "only human agents may make genuine assertions, suggestions and hypotheses" (102). In consequence, he opts for a moderate actual intentionalism, according to which the interpretation of a text, especially when it comes to extracting the literary assertion it suggests, should use the actual author's intentions, insofar as they are "recoverable from her work, the context of the utterance and our information about her" (105), as a guideline.

Mikkonen does not make an attempt to illustrate his theoretical views with a close reading of a concrete literary work, which only underlines the fact that his book is a work of philosophy of literature, not literary theory. Moreover, throughout his book, he shows great sensitivity for literature. At various places he reminds us of the particularities of literary language and avoids the temptation to explain literature's cognitive value with theories that have been developed in different contexts. By limiting his discussion to literary works of art that pertain to the category of philosophical fiction, he avoids making undue generalizations from a small set of examples to the huge and varied range of literary works.

In this way he can develop a view according to which each literary work of philosophical fiction can impart propositional knowledge to the reader in its own, unique way. The very conception of literary assertions shows that the suggestions literary works offer do not have the same structure as the propositions that characterize other forms of knowledge transfer. They differ from regular assertions in three ways: they have a dual layered meaning, i.e., their truth-value can be assessed at two different levels; they are aspectival, i.e., they display the perspective of the speaker, protagonist, or narrator; and they are in general not stated but conveyed by a fictional statement (70ff.). Moreover, as we have seen above, Mikkonen suggests that these assertions are argued for in a specific way, by incomplete arguments or enthymemes. At several places he hints that the cognitive value of literature depends not only on the author, but also on the reader who is invited to contemplate and weigh the suggestions formulated in or emerging from the text -- but Mikkonen does not systematically elaborate this line of reasoning. In short, he prepares the stage for arguing that literary works of philosophical fiction have a cognitive value sui generis, a position that could be further developed into an argument for literature's particular contribution to and, in consequence, indispensability for human culture.

It did come as a surprise for me that Mikkonen takes a different turn in the final chapter. In it he presents a conversational view that rests on the idea that literary works of art are the product of the author's actions that essentially serve to communicate with the reader. Mikkonen distinguishes two different -- and equally valuable -- ways of approaching literary texts: the conversational and the literary approach. While the former focuses on the cognitive dimension of the text and aims at identifying the author's utterance, the latter focuses on a text's aesthetic qualities:
literary interpretation and the conversational philosophical approach to a literary work concern the same object [i.e., the literary text] but are governed by different aims: roughly put, literary interpretation is about interpreting a work of art, whereas the conversational philosophical approach focuses on identifying the author's philosophical message. . . . one [reading] treats them as literary works, [while the other] emphasizes their philosophical characteristics." (119).

This presupposes, however, that in literary works of philosophical fiction we can sharply distinguish between a literary or aesthetic function on the one hand, and a philosophical or cognitive function on the other. Mikkonen admits that it is possible to simultaneously pay attention to both functions and suggests that the conversational philosophical approach does not reduce the text to a philosophical treatise, but can take the text "as an artwork that puts forward philosophical views" (120). The conversational approach does not, thus, ignore aesthetic features of the literary work of art, but considers them only insofar as they are cognitively relevant. "In general, philosophical approaches to literature are not philosophical theories of literature, but theories of the philosophical function of (certain genres of) literature." (120).

This last point, it seems to me, stands in tension with Mikkonen's aforementioned view that literary works of art have a cognitive value sui generis. If the cognitive value is a result of a text's being a work of literature, as he suggests, one should expect that a reading that focuses on the cognitive content of the work - the literary assertions it contains - will need to base itself on its literary dimension. Moreover, it is far from clear to me that the literary and the conversational dimensions can be separated: after all, if an author chooses to communicate with the reader by producing a literary work of art, it is to be expected that the aesthetic and literary aspects of the work will serve this end of communication - or else she could have opted to communicate her assertions, suggestions, or hypotheses by writing a scientific essay or treatise or some other kind of text. If literary works of art have a cognitive value sui generis, the literary approach to the work should be essential for revealing this cognitive dimension.

... In short, the book is not only an interesting contribution for readers who are already familiar with the debate, but also a valuable source for those looking for an introduction to the field.

With: Carola Barbero (Turin), Manuel Garcia Carpintero (Barcelona), Clotilde Calabi (Milan), Wolfgang Huemer (Parma), Jukka Mikkonen (Tampere), Marci Santambrogio (Parma), Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (Marburg), Alberto Voltolini (Turin)
For more information consult: http://filosofia.unipr.it