The moral vision of technology in contemporary Latin American fiction
pp. 289-295
in: Carl Mitcham (ed), Philosophy of technology in Spanish speaking countries, Berlin, Springer, 1993Abstract
The relationship between philosophy and literature has always been both interesting and frustrating. Philosophers and writers of fiction often explore the same ideas — ideas dealing with ethics, aesthetics, logic, and metaphysics, with morals and values and how we make choices, with the nature and meaning of human experience, and with the laws which underlie knowledge and reality. But they do not approach these questions in the same way. Philosophy deals explicitly with ideas, and abstracts and examines them in a detailed, systematic manner. Literature deals implicitly with ideas by embodying them in the feelings and actions of characters, and the situations in which they find themselves. Although structured, as any art form is, literature does not set ideas out in the rigorous, systematic lines which philosophy does. For a novelist to do so would be counterproductive. Novelists often make rather dreary philosophers, just as philosophers often make rather dreary novelists. Nevertheless, literature and philosophy present us with complementary viewpoints on ideas which concern us all deeply. To say that philosophy and literature represent theory and practice may be simplistic, but it begins to explain the relationship between the two.