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Bence Nanay, Philosophy versus Literature? Against the Discontinuity Thesis, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 71, Issue 4, November 2013, Pages 349–360, https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12033
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ABSTRACT
According to what I call the ‘Discontinuity Thesis,’ literature can never count as genuine philosophizing: there is an impermeable barrier separating it from philosophy. While philosophy presents logically valid arguments in favor of or against precisely formulated statements, literature gives neither precisely formulated theses nor arguments in favor of or against them. Hence, philosophers do not lose out on anything if they do not read literature. There are two obvious ways of questioning the Discontinuity Thesis: first, arguing that literature can indeed do what philosophy is generally taken to do, and, second, arguing that philosophy is not, in fact, the presentation of logically valid arguments in favor of or against precisely formulated statements—what it does is closer to what literature is generally taken to do. I use a combination of these two strategies to argue that philosophy is not as intellectually straightforward as it is advertised to be, and literature is not as intellectually impoverished as it is generally taken to be.
