Reference no: EM133365468

Question: It would appear that the question, what is a person?, is a quintessentially philosophical query. It is true that Johnson traffi cked with philosophical texts and their modes of argumentation and interrogation. Yet as we follow her arguments, we see how a literary theorist can and must engage a philosophical question in a distinctive way. In the fi rst place, she pursues the question through a reading of a par tic u lar text, and that text may be literary, legal, philosophical, or drawn from pop u lar discourse. In the second place, or perhaps simultaneously, she tracks how the question itself is formulated in the terms of the text, not only how certain fi gures are presupposed but how the fi gures presuppose certain philosophical claims. What makes this work "theory" would be diffi cult to summarize, but it seems possible to say minimally that philosophical questions are pursued precisely in light of the terms in which they are formulated. The philosophical proposition never quite stands alone, because to declare a philosophical truth is still to deploy the declarative mode of speech and so, already, to engage the history and techniques of rhetoric and, more specifi cally, modes of address. To whom is the phi los o pher speaking when he or she makes such a claim? Is there not implicitly a problem of audience and address even in the simplest of propositional claims? What shadow of the other haunts every true proposition? To what legacy of fi gures do its referents belong?