The tension between philosophy and literature goes back so far that even Plato described it as "an ancient quarrel." He, of course, intensified the quarrel by proposing that in his utopia the best of the poets would first be praised and then escorted to the nearest border. And since Plato's day there remains a suspicion among philosophers that the literary arts trespass on philosophical territory by getting people to feel philosophical conclusions rather than reason their way to them. But perhaps philosophers, even the most rigorously analytic, can't help but do something like that themselves when it comes to their deepest intuitions about the nature of reality.
Speaker Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist, and both an alumna and former professor at Barnard College. She is the author of many acclaimed works of philosophical fiction, including The Mind-Body Problem, Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, and Plato at the Googleplex, as well as many other works of fiction and non-fiction.
Upper Manhattan, New York, NY