H. P. Rickman

"This book, a collection of essays, addresses the question "How can we achieve a better, i.e., more soundly based and systematically unified understanding of the human world?" Human problems abound in our world: there is crime, mental illness, industrial conflict, and violent suspicion between nations, races, creeds, and cultures. While improved theories cannot solve all our problems, increased insight might help. The disciplines supposed to aid us such as psychology or sociology disappoint our hopes. There is conflict not only between them but among them and there is lack of clarity about concepts and methods. Until recently salvation was sought by clinging closely to the immensely successful methods of the physical sciences but there is increasing recognition in the human sciences that observation, which provides evidence of the physical sciences, needs to be supplemented by understanding, because human beings talk, and communications are an indispensable source of knowledge. The critical question addressed in this book then is: once we are forced to abandon the rigor of disciplines such as physics how can the human disciplines be systematic and develop clear criteria for the adequacy of conclusions?"--BOOK JACKET.

In this book, scholar and author H. P. Rickman considers the entanglement of philosophy and literature, as felt by both philosophers and poets alike. Although the two fields are distinct because argumentation is an essential characteristic of the former, and presentation is vital to the latter, the two disciplines share such features as a distance from practical, everyday life. They also supplement each other. While philosophers employ such literary devices as dialogue and metaphors, poets and novelists write about virtue and vice, truth and illusion, the passage of time, the vagaries of human nature, and the workings of destiny, concepts which all receive helpful illumination in philosophy. Literary theory, a recently mushroomed discipline, makes claims of being a metatheory of literature, and at times aims to eclipse, at others to embrace, the field of philosophy. Descriptions of literary theory range from a specialized study of principles grounding literature and literary criticism to a superdiscipline employing linguistics, psychology, and philosophy itself. However, accommodation, and even confrontation between philosophy and literary theory, is made difficult by divergent methodological approaches. Philosophy, unlike literary theory, is committed to unambiguous clarity and logical consistency and opposed to the obscure neologisms thrown up by some literary theorists.