Department of Aesthetics, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
in Prague
invites you to the lecture
FICTION AND ITS PHENOMENOLOGY
by
Paul Davies
(University of Sussex, Brighton, GB)
Abstract: Philosophy has always and no doubt with good reason been disturbed by narrative fiction. Even, and
ironically especially, those philosophers who affirm or insist on their proximity to literature and poetry seem to
shy away from the question or the problem of fiction. When it does address the problem, philosophy sometimes
attempts to handle it by talking about something else, something suitably fiction-like but whose relations with
the world or actuality are held to be not so troubling (painting, say, or games of pretence or make-belief) or
something whose conceptual scope and subsequent analysis is deemed broad enough to encompass the fictional
(the possible, the imagineable). And sometimes philosophy treats narrative fiction as no more than a species of
fiction to be theorised alongside certain other species or proposed species: scientific hypotheses; metaphors;
myths; models; numbers; a certain class of concepts or ideas (‘freedom’, ‘God’, ‘the self’) – in short, ‘useful
fictions’. But neither attempt even begins to do justice to the experience of reading and re-reading fiction and to
the ease with which we accede to a fictional world, to fictional characters, events, and places. Drawing on one or
two suggestions implicit in some phenomenological reflections on the topic, I will emphasise just how far
narrative fictionality must extend. I will offer a description of reading fiction that is sensitive to both the work /
world relation and the interplay between the fictive and an always receding non-fictive horizon. Finally, I will
argue that there are necessary distinctions to be drawn between literary fiction on the one hand and ‘useful
fictions’ on the other, between our experience of fiction as fiction on the one hand and the use of fiction (for
example, in historiography, science, and moral reasoning) on the other. The applications of what was once called
“the philosophy of ‘as if’” fails to describe or comprehend fiction as such.
The lecture will take place on
Tuesday; 10. 5. 2011 at 17:30–19:05
Room 426; Faculty of Arts, Celetna 20, Praha 1.