Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination

This edited collection investigates the kinds of moral reflection we can undertake within the imaginative worlds of literature. In philosophical contexts of ethical inquiry we can too easily forget that literary experience can play an important role in the cultivation of our ethical sensibilities. Because our ethical lives are conducted in the real world, fictional representations of this world can appear removed from ethical contemplation. However, as this stimulating volume shows, the dichotomy between fact and fiction cannot be so easily categorised. Moral perception, moral sensitivity, and ethical understanding more broadly, may all be developed in a unique way through our imaginative life in fiction.

Moral quandaries are often presented in literature in ways more linguistically precise and descriptively complete than the ones we encounter in life, whilst simultaneously offering space for contemplation. The twelve original chapters in this volume examine literary texts – including theatre and film – in this light, and taken together they show how serious reflection within fictional worlds can lead to a depth of humane insight. The topics explored include: the subtle ways that knowledge can function as a virtue; issues concerning our relations to and understanding of each other; the complex intertwining of virtues and vices in the modern world; and the importance of bringing to light and reconsidering ethical presuppositions. With an appreciation of the importance of richly contextualized particularity and the power of descriptive acuity, the volume maps out the territory that philosophical reflection and literary engagement share.        

Part I: On Knowledge as Virtue.- 1. Plato's Ion as an Ethical Performance; Toby Svobada.- 2. Foolhardly Yet Courageous: Is There Such a Thing as Quixotic Virtue?; Vicky Roupa.- 3. Knowing What Matters: The Epistemological and Ethical Challenge of Marilynne Robinson's Lila; Elisabet Dellming.- Part II: On Our Relations to Each Other.- 4."But in a dream of Friendship": Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, The Gift, and the Moral Economy of Friendship; John Mischo.- 5. Kant and Frankenstein: On Purity, Contingency, and "Patchwork" Morality; Paul Firenze.- 6. Plights of Mind and Circumstance: Stanley Cavell and David Foster Wallace on Scepticism; Paul Jenner.-  Part III: Virtue and Vice in a Modern World.- 7. "The Devil's Territories": Nature, the Sublime, and Witchcraft in the Puritan Imagination and Robert Egger's The Witch; Miranda Corcoram and Adrea Di Carlo.- 8.The Ethics of Betrayal: Seduction and Initiation in Dangerous Liasons; Peter Paik.- 9. De Sade's Psychopath as Prototypical Man of Enlightenment; Manuel Carabantes.- Part IV: Ethical Presuppositions, Reconsidered.- 10. "A kind of purity: Inanimacy, Disability, and Posthumanist Prefiguration in John Williams' Stoner; Jan Grue.- 11. The Curious Case of Normative Incomparability: Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, and the Limits of Comparisons; Harmut von Sass.- 12. Improvisation within the Range of Implication: Cora Diamond, Henry James, and the Space of Moral Reflection; Garry L. Hagberg.

Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, USA. Author of numerous books and articles at the intersection of the philosophy of the arts and the philosophy of language and Editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, his most recent books are Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness and Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood. Previous edited volumes with Palgrave include Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding, Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding, and Narrative and Self-Understanding.