Correspondence between philosophy and literature

Abstract

The article proposes a discussion about the relationship between philosophy and literature in three moments: in the constitution of the problem of a link that goes back to the debate around the myth-logos binomial, going prospectively from Plato to the world of Homer; in the contemporary resumption of the problem that situates the characterization of philosophy itself as a literary modality by making deliberate use of the linguistic resources typical of this poetic realm of thought; in the indispensable contribution of literature to the rescue of philosophy, so that it can adequately respond to certain problems left open by the philosophical tradition – in this case, the resource we use is the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. In all these incursions, we seek to mark the inseparable presence of the elements that make up one and the other of these dimensions of the experience of historical understanding of human existence, philosophy and literature, in an effort to underline the pertinent relationship between them.