This colloquium talk is planned as an in-person event. Registration is only required for non-CEU members.
ABSTRACT
In this talk I plan to address the question of literature’s relation to morality. It turns out that the exploration of this issue leads us to question the standard view of moral growth and virtue. On the standard view, moral growth is the acquisition of good dispositions for feeling, thought and action in upbringing and virtue is a matter of the exercise, refinement and fine-tuning of dispositions that are settled. Contra this view, I argue that a proper appreciation of literature’s relation to morality paves the way for an account of moral maturity and virtue not as a state one grows into but as itself a manner of growing.
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