Phi Fic means Philosophical Fiction. Each episode, we have a candid dicussion on a heady work of of fiction, full of SPOILERS. Join host Nathan Hanks and readers Cezary Baraniecki, Daniel St. Pierre, Laura Davis, and Mary Claire, plus the occasional guest.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” —H.P. Lovecraft
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Phi Fic #6 “The Beast in the Jungle” by Henry James
Join the Phi Fic group for a discussion of The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James.
Hear more Phi Fic discussions at PhiFicPodcast.com.
Phi Fic #5 “Pale Fire” by Vladimir Nabokov
So, you think Lolita was Nabokov’s best? We humbly submit a solid contender. Structured as a 999-line poem followed by an extensive afterword and index, Pale Fire has been described by the critic Harold Bloom as “the surest demonstration of [Nabokov’s] genius…”
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Martha Nussbaum on Emotions, Ethics, and Literature
When it comes to ethics and human choice, there is “a serious candidate for truth” that we haven’t considered properly.
The Genre of Despair
With the fall of Rome, the desire to escape what seemed to be a hopeless and dying world was the impetus for Christianity’s rise. Is our current trend toward escapism a sign that we’re repeating the same pattern?
Lucian: the Well of Laughter
Lucian of Samosata (c. 125–180 CE) was a Greek-speaking Assyrian satirist, who falls within the tradition of the laughing philosophers. He was the George Carlin or perhaps the Bill Maher of his day, eloquently mocking both the credulous masses and the charlatans who made a living off of them.
Philosophical Fiction Reading: Woolf’s To The Lighthouse
We are going to read To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf for our conversation this March in Philosophical Fiction. A few regulars and I chose a book from our List of Suggestions to read before our conversation where we’ll go over the plot, discuss the characters, recall apt passages, and try to get at what everything is all about anyway. To The Lighthouse will be my first Virginia Woolf Continue Reading …
Reading Fiction in February, ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Connor
Our Philosophical Fiction story for February is ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Connor, where a grandmother and her family go on vacation yet encounter an outlaw known as The Misfit.
Literature and Philosophy: Antagonists or Partners?
Can literature be philosophical? Can philosophy be considered literature? What are the roles of literature and philosophy in relation to “truth?” Why should philosophers be interested in literature? While trying to come up with something to post in relation to the recent PEL discussion on Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” I came across an interesting discussion over at Continue Reading …
Ripping the Classics
An amusing article by Jeanette DeMain on Salon.com about Amazon one-star reviews of classic books caught my eye. Its thesis is that for every book our culture (or likely, you in particular) finds great, there’s likely a horrific review of it posted. Now, of course many of these reviews are by semi-literate anti-intellectual assholes. Still, I think that history and Continue Reading …