Don Garrett

Philosophers have long disagreed about whether poetry, drama, and other literary arts are important to philosophy and among those who believe that they are important, explanations of that importance have differed greatly. This paper aims to explain and illustrate some of the reasons why Hume found literature to be an important topic for philosophy and philosophers. Philosophy, he holds, can help to explain general and specific literary phenomena, to ground the science of criticism, and to suggest and justify "principles of art," while at the same time literature can provide valuable "experiments" for philosophical theorizing and provide it with a model for the science of morals and (in some ways) for philosophy itself. Moreover, the literary arts can not only help one to write better philosophy, in Hume's view they can also help one to write philosophy better.