Pascal Engel
According to literary cognitivism, there are literary truths and literature, including fiction, provides a form of knowledge. This thesis runs up against familiar objections, which have led its defenders to weaken it or render it trivial. The other option is to argue that literary knowledge is practical knowledge, of a fundamentally different kind from propositional knowledge of truths. This is the thesis I intend to defend, but with a serious modification: literary knowledge is practical knowledge, but propositional. Stanley and Williamson's (2001) thesis, which reduces practical knowledge to propositional knowledge, may well be correct in the case of literary knowledge, because literature does not convey practical knowledge directly, but indirectly, through practical descriptions or modes of presentation. I would suggest that this can be applied to a few literary examples.
Pascal Engel is a philosopher, director of studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales since 2012, and a member of the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage.
He has written on the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of knowledge. His latest books are Les lois de l'esprit, Julien Benda ou la raison, (Ithaque 2012) and Verità, credenza, voluntà (Jouvence, Milano, 2014) and Philosophy of Psychology (forthcoming).
Research
Pascal Engel's current research focuses on the relationship between belief, knowledge and truth. His recent work focuses on the semantics, ontology and epistemology of these norms, their relationship to values, including practical values, and the field of reasons in general. The conception of norms he tries to defend is realist and cognitivist. More recently, he has tried to develop the consequences of this conception in the fields of philosophy of logic, philosophy of literature and social epistemology.
