Philosophy and literature are two cultural forms that resemble one another. Both seek to communicate about the world through language and generally record their interpretations of the world in written texts. Both can address the same subjects.
Since the Enlightenment, however, the potential commonalities between philosophy and literature have tended to become a problem. With Newton and Kant, philosophy has been oriented toward the truth value of the sciences. Literature, on the other hand, is classified as part of the fine arts. The Romantic movement contradicted this view. Science, according to Schelling, should first reach the point where art already is. Immediately afterward, Hegel attempted to mediate the issue. The controversy, however, remains at the center. Its protagonists include not only Nietzsche, Lukács, and Heidegger.
Even for Adorno, the scientific exploration of the world has failed, since it has fostered an instrumental reason that has contributed to the domination of humanity and nature. By separating itself from empirical reality, aesthetics can escape the compulsion toward identity and stand alongside the non-identical, the foreign, and the other. Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett are authorities on this matter. In his famous text “The Essay as Form,” which can be regarded as a programmatic treatise on the separation of knowledge and science, Adorno challenges the methodological approach to the question of truth to the utmost. In the debate over positivism, he advises proponents of the empirical sciences to concern themselves not with protocol statements but rather with Karl Kraus’s critique of language.
Habermas, on the other hand, broadens the understanding of science. In addition to the technical, there is also an emancipatory interest in knowledge, as pursued, for example, by psychoanalysis. This broadening requires a differentiation. Accordingly, the generic distinction between philosophy and literature must be recognized and taken into account. This helps avert a prioritization of rhetoric over logic, as is allegedly found in the work of Jacques Derrida, for example.
Following this modernist controversy, the international and interdisciplinary conference will once again examine the relationship between literature and philosophy in eight presentations.
Program:
09:15–10:05 Lukas Nehlsen: Philosophy and/as Literature?
10:10–11:00 Leonard Föcher: Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”: Philosophical and Fictional Concepts
11:00–11:20 Coffee Break
11:20–12:10 Markus Dederich: Blindness as a Philosophical and Literary Topos
12:15–13:05 Jens Pier: No Words in Our Language: Primo Levi and Cora Diamond
on Dehumanization
1:05–2:00 p.m. Lunch break
2:00–2:50 p.m. Martin W. Schnell: Phenomenology of the Crime Novel: The Vulnerable Human Being
Between Good and Evil
2:55–3:45 p.m. Andreas Brenner: Murder and Lies in Fiction and Science
3:45–4:05 p.m. Coffee break
4:05–4:55 p.m. Johannes Bungenstab: Wolfgang Iser’s Implicit Reader and
Philosophical Texts
5:00–5:50 p.m. Johannes Wally: The Thinking of Form: The Literary Text as
Model of Reality
The event is free of charge. Registration is not required.