OverLAP Conference 2017: Forms of Knowledge
On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, I attended a conference on the intersection between literature and philosophy, suitably titled the OverLAP Conference 2017, about ‘Forms of Knowledge’. The conference was organised by my inimitable and exceptional doctoral colleagues who run the OverLAP Literature and Philosophy reading group based in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. I had a paper accepted to this conference (an excerpt from my MSc dissertation on absolute music and the divine in the poems of W.H. Auden). I struggled to get this together because of a recent bout of ill-health. Despite these setbacks, and despite getting flustered and losing track of my argument half-way through my paper, I reckon I enjoyed the conference and gained a lot from it.
True to its interdisciplinary spirit, the conference brought together academics from both disciplines. The conference was also shameless in its disregard of the analytic/continental split. It was interesting to observe, in such stark terms, the different methodologies used by philosophers (especially in the Anglo-American tradition) and literary scholars: the former were detailed, technical and systematic, advancing their argument in an almost scientific, logical method. A reader’s engagement with literary works was then marshalled to make a wider ontological or epistemic argument. For example, the opening panel contemplated the cognitive value or function of a literary work in a paper by Gilbert Plumer, and William Goodwin examined how literature can serve as what Daniel Dennett described as ‘intuition pumps’ in refining our understanding about phenomena. Literary scholars, on the other hand, tended to take philosophy as more abstract, focussing instead on how philosophical ideas can illuminate literary texts, rather than what literary texts have to say to a philosophical argument. So in the same panel on the cognitive function of literature, Charlotte Arnatou responded to the metaphysical questions posed by Plumer through her discussion of the metaphysical detective fiction, and how the genre embodied a certain postmodern sensibility of the perspectival nature of our apprehension of reality.
These differences in methodologies might seem obvious at first, but they had a significant bearing on the style of papers presented and the tenor of questions in the Q&A. But that is not to say that people talked past each other. These tensions between different methods were more productive than they were inhibiting. There was a great deal of common ground once we got past the superficial differences in methodology. To my mind, literature and philosophy have always gone together. (I suppose there’s no surprise here as my pedigree is a combined honours degree in Philosophy and English Literature.) I really appreciated Goodwin’s paper as it contemplated not what literature can say to philosophy, but how literature itself is philosophy.
What was most remarkable about the conference was the way in which all of the panels progressed gradually into more detailed discussions on issues surrounding metaphysics and epistemology. On the first day, the first panel asked, crudely speaking, how literature makes us think. Subsequent panels then considered how literature deals with the central epistemological questions of what we can know and how we can know it, the role of affect in literature and knowledge, and finally the specific kinds of knowledge and experience that poetry gives us. On the second day, the panels examined how specific philosophical ideas related to literary works, like existentialism, Martin Heidegger’s notions of being and recognition, the incorporation of contemporary philosophical ideas like deconstructivism and modal realism into literary theory and, finally, the relationship between science, literature and philosophy. Finally, the keynote lecture by Sandra Laugier entitled ‘Ethics, Literature and What Matters’ grounded all of our discussions in philosophy and literature in a more pressing ethical question, of how literature can make apparent to us what matters in our relations with others, and how we can ground our ethics on this.
Nevertheless, the scope of the conference, the depth of the discussions and the spirit of innovation would all have been greatly strengthened with the inclusion of non-western philosophical traditions and literatures. I find it rather ironic that, while making this observation, I nevertheless focussed on a Western writer within a framework of Western philosophy. But the conference has made me aware of a field I have not explored adequately, a field I am hoping to learn more about in the future.
Acknowledgements: My sincerest thanks to all the delegates at the OverLAP Conference, and to the organisers of the Conference for inviting me to present there. I really valued the supportive and collegiate atmosphere of the conference and all of the contributions made by participants in their talks as well as their questions and feedback.