Philosophies

This chapter concerns Coetzee’s encounter with philosophers and philosophy. After a brief description of Coetzee’s formation and institutional affiliations, it turns its focus to the ways in which Coetzee has probed both the capacity of literary works to confront philosophical questions and the innate capacities and limitations of philosophy’s own embedded disciplinary procedures and approved forms of discourse. It argues that Coetzee has done this by developing provocations: elaborating propositions – about the nature of human language, consciousness, and being; about the nature of truth, knowledge, and existence – that entice and frustrate philosophical readers, asking that they at least consider what their discipline takes for granted or leaves out of account in its framing of these issues.