Literary Fiction and Rationality

Literature gives us a unique opportunity to examine persons and their lives. For example, literature may be seen as illuminating rationality and the different kinds of reasons that agents have for their actions, beliefs, and judgements. It also enables us to examine rationality as a property of a person, and reasons as constituted by the context of a person’s life narrative. Literature may also be considered a source of empirical, moral, and aesthetic reasons and beliefs. The purpose of this conference is to critically discuss these and other conceptions of the relation between literary fiction and rationality.