Tzachi Zamir (editor) - Shakespeares Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives

Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature

Richard Eldridge, Philosophy, Swarthmore College

Editorial Board

Anthony J. Cascardi, Comparative Literature, Romance Languages, and Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley

David Damrosch, Comparative Literature, Harvard University

Moira Gatens, Philosophy, University of Sydney

Garry Hagberg, Philosophy, Bard College

Philip Kitcher, Philosophy, Columbia University

Joshua Landy, French and Comparative Literature, Stanford University

Toril Moi, Literature, Romance Studies, Philosophy, and Theater Studies, Duke University

Martha C. Nussbaum, Philosophy and School of Law, University of Chicago

Bernard Rhie, English, Williams College

David Wellbery, Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

Paul Woodruff, Philosophy and Classics, University of Texas at Austin

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ISBN 9780190698522 (pbk.); 9780190698515 (cloth); eISBN 9780190698546

Richard Eldridge

Tzachi Zamir

John Gibson

Paul Woodruff

David Hillman

Paul A. Kottman

Sanford Budick

Joshua Landy

David Schalkwyk

Sarah Beckwith

Kristin Gjesdal

RICHARD ELDRIDGE

At least since Plato had Socrates criticize the poets and attempt to displace Homer as the authoritative articulator and transmitter of human experience and values, philosophy and literature have developed as partly competing, partly complementary enterprises. Both literary writers and philosophers have frequently studied and commented on each others texts and ideas, sometimes with approval, sometimes with disapproval, in their efforts to become clearer about human life and about valuable commitmentsmoral, artistic, political, epistemic, metaphysical, and religious, as may be. Platos texts themselves register the complexity and importance of these interactions in being dialogues in which both deductive argumentation and dramatic narration do central work in furthering a complex body of views.

While these relations have been widely recognized, they have also frequently been ignored or misunderstood, as academic disciplines have gone their separate ways within their modern institutional settings. Philosophy has often turned to science or mathematics as providing models of knowledge; in doing so it has often explicitly set itself against cultural entanglements and literary devices, rejecting, at least officially, the importance of plot, figuration, and imagery in favor of supposedly plain speech about the truth. Literary study has moved variously through formalism, structuralism, poststructuralism, and cultural studies, among other movements, as modes of approach to a literary text. In doing so it has understood literary texts as sample instances of images, structures, personal styles, or failures of consciousness, or it has seen the literary text as a largely fungible product, fundamentally shaped by wider pressures and patterns of consumption and expectation that affect and figure in nonliterary textual production as well. It has thus set itself against the idea that major literary texts productively and originally address philosophical problems of value and commitment precisely through their form, diction, imagery, and development, even while these works also resist claiming conclusively to solve the problems that occupy them.

These distinct academic traditions have yielded important perspectives and insights. But in the end none of them has been kind to the idea of major literary works as achievements in thinking about values and human life, often in distinctive, open, self-revising, self-critical ways. At the same time readers outside institutional settings, and often enough philosophers and literary scholars too, have turned to major literary texts precisely in order to engage with their productive, materially, and medially specific patterns and processes of thinking. These turns to literature have, however, not so far been systematically encouraged within disciplines, and they have generally occurred independently of each other.

The aim of this series is to make manifest the multiple, complex engagements with philosophical ideas and problems that lie at the hearts of major literary texts. In doing so, its volumes aim not only to help philosophers and literary scholars of various kinds to find rich affinities and provocations to further thought and work, they also aim to bridge various gaps between academic disciplines and between those disciplines and the experiences of extrainstitutional readers.

Each volume focuses on a single, undisputedly major literary text. Both philosophers with training and experience in literary study and literary scholars with training and experience in philosophy are invited to engage with themes, details, images, and incidents in the focal text, through which philosophical problems are held in view, worried at, and reformulated. Decidedly not a project simply to formulate As philosophy of X as a finished product, merely illustrated in the text, and decidedly not a project to explain the literary work entirely by reference to external social configurations and forces, the effort is instead to track the work of open thinking in literary forms, as they lie both neighbor to and aslant from philosophy. As Walter Benjamin once wrote, new centers of reflection are continually forming, as problems of commitment and value of all kinds take on new shapes for human agents in relation to changing historical circumstances, where reflective address remains possible. By considering how such centers of reflection are formed and expressed in and through literary works, as they engage with philosophical problems of agency, knowledge, commitment, and value, these volumes undertake to present both literature and philosophy as, at times, productive forms of reflective, medial work in relation both to each other and to social circumstances, and to show how this work is specifically undertaken and developed in distinctive and original ways in exemplary works of literary art.

Richard Eldridge

Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy

Swarthmore College

Sarah Beckwith