There is, we know, a kind of power in stories.

So we use them as an educative tool,

specifically in context where we're tutoring or teaching or even homilizing.

And stories have a way, a capacity to communicate a sense of self,

to communicate community, relationships, and even to communicate culture.

We use stories when we sit around and regale our friends.

With them, we create bonds of solidarity.

With them, we encourage mutual understanding.

But might stories, and specifically literature, also serve as philosophy. So in what follows, I propose to address

three concerns or three questions. First, what is philosophy? Second, what is literature, or what

purpose does it serve? And third, how can literature function in the task of philosophizing? And whether

or not it can do so fruitfully.

So first, what is philosophy?

I suppose to even ask the question sounds a little bit dramatic, but we can begin with the etymology, so it's filetio, I love, Sophia, wisdom.

So philosophy is generally acknowledged as a kind of love of wisdom. And as it's been

practiced in the tradition, dating back to Thales and the pre-Socratic, so at least for the last

2,600 years, is as a kind of deliberate pursuit of the causes of the things at stake, the causes

of reality, so that we can grasp something of their very

natures. So the first questions that animated the Preciatics, like Thales and Anaximonies and

Anaximander at Alia, was what is the stuff out of which the world is constituted, and specifically

how do I account for continuity and for change?

And so it wasn't sufficient to just do science and the way we kind of understand it as empirical

...