Literature and Philosophy: An international Conference
Philosophy and literature are two cultural forms that bear similarities. Both seek to make sense of the world through language and generally record their interpretations of the world in written texts. Both may deal with the same subject matter.
Since the Enlightenment, however, the potential similarities between philosophy and literature have tended to become a problem. With Newton and Kant, philosophy came to be oriented towards the truth-value of the sciences. Literature, meanwhile, was assigned to the realm of the fine arts. The Romantic movement took issue with this. Science, according to Schelling, ought first to reach the point where art has already arrived. In the immediate aftermath, Hegel sought to mediate on the matter. The controversy, however, remains at the centre. Its protagonists include not only Nietzsche, Lukács and Heidegger.
Even for Adorno, the scientific exploration of the world has failed, as it has fostered an instrumental reason that has contributed to the domination of humankind and nature. By separating itself from empirical reality, aesthetics can escape the compulsion to identity and stand by 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 nothing less than a manifesto for the separation of knowledge and science, Adorno challenges the methodological approach to the question of truth to the very extreme. In the debate on positivism, he advises the proponents of the empirical sciences not to concern themselves with ‘protocol sentences’, but rather with Karl Kraus’s critique of language.
Habermas, on the other hand, broadens the understanding of science. Alongside the technical dimension, there is also an emancipatory interest in knowledge, as pursued, for example, by psychoanalysis. This broadening requires a distinction to be made. Accordingly, the difference in genre between philosophy and literature must be recognised and taken into account. This makes it possible to avert a prioritisation of rhetoric over logic, as is said to be found, for example, in the work of Jacques Derrida.
Following on from this modernist controversy, the international and interdisciplinary conference will once again examine the relationship between literature and philosophy in eight lectures.
Programme:
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 Dehumanisation
13:05–14:00 Lunch break
14:00–14:50 Martin W. Schnell: Phenomenology of the Crime Novel: The vulnerable human
being between good and evil
14:55–15:45 Andreas Brenner: Murder and lies in fiction and science
15:45–16:05 Coffee break
16:05–16:55 Johannes Bungenstab: Wolfgang Iser’s Implicit Reader and
Philosophical Texts
17:00–17:50 Johannes Wally: The Thinking of Form: The Literary Text as
a Model of Reality
The event is free of charge. Registration is not required.