It is doubly ironic that during the last twenty years the ethical functions of literature – for centuries of prime concern to imaginative writers and literary critics – have been repudiated by a majority of literary theorists (all driven in various ways, as Mark Edmundson has recently argued, by the centuries-old platonic will to disenfranchise art), while at the same time so many philosophers have sought to re-enfranchise literature by arguing for its special value as a mode of moral inquiry. This chapter responds to three philosophers whose work in this latter area has opened fresh ground: Cora Diamond, Martha Nussbaum and Iris Murdoch.

Philosophy's turn to literature

In ‘Martha Nussbaum and the need for novels’ (chapter 2 of this volume) Cora Diamond endorses Martha Nussbaum's claims and outlines a qualificatory critique of them. I broadly agree with her arguments, but think they need to be taken further and, in the process, modified. Coming at this from the literary side I shall focus upon what seems to me a problematic link between (a) philosophy's ‘need’ of literature, and (b) some difficulties in the crossover from philosophical to literary modes of thought. To recognise this link may be the best way to avoid a sort of transdisciplinary catch-22. For brevity's sake, I shall use the term ‘philosophy’ to mean contemporary analytic philosophy, and the term ‘literature’ to mean literary art of some depth.

Philosophy's ‘need’ of literature arises from what many philosophers regard as limitations of analytic philosophy. These are both procedural and substantial: they concern philosophy's characteristic habits of argument, and its relatively narrow conception of what constitutes moral refection and moral life.