Philosophical Conceptualization and Literary Art

This book offers an original orientation to how speculative thinking may be profoundly stimulated - the philosophical imagination transformatively enlarged - through intermediating engagements with the work of art. The author illustrates the practical implications of this orientation by selecting an inferential model of concept formation to highlight the philosophically pregnant routes of inference that such engagements can sponsor.Separate chapters show how a variety of independently interesting metaphysical, phenomenological, and onto-aesthetic concepts of Desmond, Otto, and Heidegger get amplified and deepened when entertained as conceptual attunements rather than as fixed, mediating terms. The study culminates by focusing on how an intermediating engagement with artwork can inferentially enlarge the very concept of the work of art.