Charles Repp

Longwood University
  •  5
    What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning? (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 73 (3): 892-895. 2023.
    Questions about the meaning of life are widely assumed to be much older than the phrase itself. Many philosophers see nothing anachronistic, for instance, in talking about Aristotle's view on the meaning of life or looking to Ecclesiastes for evidence of what makes life meaningless, though neither Aristotle nor Ecclesiastes mentions meaning or meaninglessness as such. On this common way of thinking, nothing very philosophically important hangs on the fact that we now attach the term meaning to t…Read more
  •  24
    Does Heath Have a Good Answer to Steinberg?
    with Justin Contat
    Business Ethics Journal Review 7 (3): 14-20. 2019.
    Etye Steinberg has recently raised a problem for Joseph Heath’s Market Failures Approach. In this paper we consider a response by Heath. We argue that Heath’s response not only leaves the original problem intact, but also raises a second one, analogous to stakeholder theory’s so-called “identification problem.”
  •  36
    Justification from Fictional Narratives
    Journal of Aesthetic Education 48 (1): 25-44. 2014.
    Many people claim that we can gain knowledge from reading novels and other forms of narrative fiction. In a trivial sense, this claim seems uncontroversial. There is no doubt that reading Pride and Prejudice can teach me, for example, what the novel is about or give me some insight into the character of Regency English. This is because a novel, like any other text, constitutes direct evidence for propositions about its own content and language. But it is widely questioned whether such a work cou…Read more
  •  33
    Life Meaning and Sign Meaning
    Philosophical Papers 47 (3): 403-427. 2018.
    Volume 47, Issue 3, November 2018, Page 403-427.
  •  23
    Coherence, Literary and Epistemic
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (1): 59-71. 2017.
    Coherence is a term of art in both epistemology and literary criticism, and in both contexts judgments of coherence carry evaluative significance. However, whereas the epistemic use of the term picks out a property of belief sets, the literary use can pick out properties of various elements of a literary work, including its plot, characters, and style. For this reason, some have claimed that literary critics are not concerned with the same concept of coherence as epistemologists. In this article…Read more
  •  97
    What's Wrong with Didacticism?
    British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (3): 271-285. 2012.
    Works of literature that are too overtly instructive are commonly faulted for being didactic. For so-called literary cognitivists, who believe that instruction is an important literary value, this seems to pose a problem: if we value literature for the instruction it affords, why would we ever object to overt instruction? In this paper I propose the following answer: overt instruction can arouse suspicion of intellectual vices in the author, such as intellectual arrogance, dogmatism, and prejudi…Read more