Dartmouth Events

Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Hannah Kim, University of Arizona

4:30pm
Location: Rockefeller 209 (tentative)

Talk title: "There is No ‘Standard’ Philosophy of Fiction"
Description: "Philosophy of fiction has long engaged foundational questions across metaphysics, philosophy of language, mind, and aesthetics. This paper argues that much of this discourse is distorted by its detachment from the specific features that constitute actual works of fiction. Genre, form, and medium are not optional embellishments layered onto a baseline notion of “standard” fiction—they are the very conditions under which something functions as fiction in the first place. Yet because certain configurations (e.g., prose realism in Anglo-European traditions) have become default, these structuring features have been rendered invisible. Focusing on debates around imaginative resistance and fictional truth, I show that key philosophical puzzles would have looked very different—if they arose at all—had philosophers taken seriously the role of genre conventions, formal devices, and medium-specific constraints. This is a call to reorient philosophy of fiction toward real examples and richer interpretive contexts."

Funded by the Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy, which is an endowment established in 1996 to help support the study of philosophy at Dartmouth College. For more information on Philosophy's Sapientia Lecture Series, please visit this link.