Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing

Jon Stewart is Associate Research Professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at Copenhagen University, Denmark. A member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, he is coeditor of the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook; editor of two series on Kierkegaard Research; and author of Kierkegaard and his Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark, and Idealism and Existentialism: Hegel and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century European Philosophy (Continuum 2010).

• Acknowledgements \ Introduction: The Problem of Philosophical Writing \ 1. The Platonic Dialogue and the Sophists \ 2. Paradox and Oxymoron in Seneca’s Epistulae Morales \ 3. Satire as Philosophy: Erasmus’ Praise of Folly \ 4. The Enlightenment and Religion: Hume’s Dialogues \ 5. Philosophy and Drama: Lessing’s Nathan the Wise \ 6. Kierkegaard’s Use of Genre in the Struggle with German Philosophy \ 7. Borges’ Refutation of Nominalism in ‘Funes the Memorious’: The Short Story as a Philosophical Argument \ 8. Borges’ Refutation of Idealism: A Study of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ \ 9. Language, Conceptual Schemes and Immortality: Borges’ Use of the Short Story as a Philosophical reductio ad absurdum in The Aleph \ 10. Sartre and Existential Theater: Bariona and The Flies \ 11. Philosophy, Literature and Rorty: Concluding Reflections \ Notes \ Bibliography \ Index

Jon Stewart's impressive erudition illuminates the mosaic of philosophical writing's diverse forms and styles against the backdrop of the history of philosophy and its occasional cross-pollination with literary form. From Plato to Rorty, Lessing to Borges, Seneca to Sartre, The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing directs our attention to the dialectical relationship between the content of form and the form of content. The result is at once a harsh indictment of form and style in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy and a celebration of that tradition's rich potential. Like Søren Kierkegaard's pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, Stewart is a watchman: his book warns of the dangers of conformity and bears witness to the abundant and varied tools of written philosophical expression, the manifold of which may just be one of philosophy's greatest truths.