Most philosophical fiction?

[Kyriakos]

What is the most philosophical fictional book you ever read, which at the same time managed to be good fiction in your view?

[johann cruyff]

As far as prose goes, I don't think it gets more philosophical than The Brothers Karamazov...

[Kyriakos]

Thank you :)

I read that years ago, and currently i am looking to read a whole novel. Perhaps something smaller?

I have a short story collection by Proust, perhaps that will have some philosophical and psychological elements.

[Dodo25]

There's a very new book called '36 Arguments for the Existance of God' by Rebecca Goldstein. It's a philosophical 'work of fiction' (just like the arguments are, pun in the title).

I've read about fifty reviews and watched the author talking about the book, and eventually decided not to buy it. The basic idea seems interesting, but it isn't really what I'm looking for.

Maybe it fits for you, I won't summarize the plot here, you can google it if you're interested.

[OrphanPip]

The post-war French existentialist are pretty good in my opinion. Camus' The Fall, and The Stranger are intensely philosophical if not as direct as Dostoevsky. Sartre's Nausea and his play No-Exit. I think de Beauvoir's nonfiction is better than her novels, but The Mandarins is fairly well regarded.

[Buh4Bee]

Tolstoy is extremely philosophical in his fictional writing.

[Rores28]

I'll second Brothers Karamazov... and The Stranger, also Notes from Underground and Siddhartha

[Kyriakos]

Of those i haven't read only Siddartha. I will probably start reading it :)

[Rores28]

Yea I loved siddhartha... plus its eastern philosophy which I personally had very little exposure to

[TheFifthElement]

Kyriakos, you might want to try the works of Jose Saramago, I'd particularly recommend The Cave which works both as philosophy and a work of fiction. His other books also have a philosophical bent.

Iris Murdoch also wrote philosophical fiction; I've just read The Unicorn and enjoyed it immensely.

Other than that, you might want to consider Hard-boiled Wonderland and the end of the World by Haruki Murakami. It bears some similarities to The Castle by Kafka, and is a little odd and spooky but interesting.

Siddhartha is good too. And Steppenwolf which is also by Hesse.

[Patrick_Bateman]

Camus and Sartre

[Kyriakos]

I have read some Camus (The Stranger, The Plague, some play which i don't recall right now, and parts of his philosophical essays) but very little Sartre, since Nausea seemed a bit dry to me.

Any special suggestion of a story by Tolstoy? (it has to be up to 40 pages, since currently i am not reading anything longer) :)

[Alexander III]

"Any special suggestion of a story by Tolstoy? (it has to be up to 40 pages, since currently i am not reading anything longer) "

War and Peace should be right up your alley in that case

[Kyriakos]

Yeah, only 100 times larger than what i need now :D

[Jassy Melson]

Tolstoy's story The Death of Ivan Illich

[Kyriakos]

Tolstoy's story The Death of Ivan Illich

It is great, but i have read it :)

[Lord Macbeth]

I actually prefer plays to novels (though I love those as well) and I would have to say Hamlet and Waiting For Godot are my picks...for obvious reasons.

For a FATALIST philosophical work, however...can't get too much better than the work I, Lord Macbeth, inhabit!

;)

As far as novels go it'd have to be Tolstoy, Dystoyevsky, and Camus off the top of my head.

[mal4mac]

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Through the character Levin he makes explicit mention of many philosopher's that he was struggling with before and while writing this novel (especially Schopenhauer.) More than forty pages though...

[Lord Macbeth]

Out of curiosity, would you count Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche as a work of philosophical literature?

CERTAINLY has the philosophy down, easily the most beautiful and passionate phrasing of many of Nietzsche's core philosophies (The idea of the Will and a prelude to the Will To Pwer, the Ubermensch, criticisms of religions and Christianity in particular...I LOVE Nietzsche's works and philosophy, not the most analytic, A-to-B-so-C thinker, but he's not trying to be, and I consider him to be the greatest of the "literary philosophers" of that group of Nietzsche, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus...I SHUDDER to include Ayn Rand...Nietzsche, Benedict Spinoza and David Hume are probably my Top 3 thinkers, with Plato and John Stuart Mill rounding out the Top 5...definitely hold more along the lines of Nietzsche and Plato with Hume's empiricism, particularly his ideas on the absurdity of miracles and his working with causality, adding structure to those ideas...I like Spinoza's take on what a "God" might be like and his argument against free will, and Mill I love the idea of Act Utilitarianism.)

It DOES tell a story...sort of...a journey story, Zarathustra goes from here to there to everywhere gaining experiences and changing...might say there's a character arc...

I don't know--count it?

[Mallorie]

I would really like to find an english copy of Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (Alive, Son Of Awake)

It is claimed to be the first philosophical novel and I am very interested in it, it is quite elusive though.
I am Syrian in decent but I do not have enough of my parent's language to read any non-english versions. :(

I know this is likely unpopular here, but I loved Anthem by Ayn Rand, it was simple to the point and creatively written which, barring We The Living, can not be said about her other works.

[Kyriakos]

Out of curiosity, would you count Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche as a work of philosophical literature?

CERTAINLY has the philosophy down, easily the most beautiful and passionate phrasing of many of Nietzsche's core philosophies (The idea of the Will and a prelude to the Will To Pwer, the Ubermensch, criticisms of religions and Christianity in particular...I LOVE Nietzsche's works and philosophy, not the most analytic, A-to-B-so-C thinker, but he's not trying to be, and I consider him to be the greatest of the "literary philosophers" of that group of Nietzsche, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus...I SHUDDER to include Ayn Rand...Nietzsche, Benedict Spinoza and David Hume are probably my Top 3 thinkers, with Plato and John Stuart Mill rounding out the Top 5...definitely hold more along the lines of Nietzsche and Plato with Hume's empiricism, particularly his ideas on the absurdity of miracles and his working with causality, adding structure to those ideas...I like Spinoza's take on what a "God" might be like and his argument against free will, and Mill I love the idea of Act Utilitarianism.)

It DOES tell a story...sort of...a journey story, Zarathustra goes from here to there to everywhere gaining experiences and changing...might say there's a character arc...

I don't know--count it?

I remember reading it many years ago. It had a structure like a collection of parables, which later on get explained, at least to some degree.
But in my view it is clearly a philosophical work, and not a fictional one. Nietzsche, i think, was not a good artist, although he tried to produce some art (poems, some musical compositions). :)

[andresarpi]

Borges has some very philosophical short stories. For example Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a story in wich the philosophic idealism of Berkeley is viewed as the common sense.
Quoting the blessed Wiki:

Through the vehicle of fantasy or speculative fiction, this story playfully explores several philosophical questions and themes. These include, above all, an effort by Borges to imagine a world (Tlön) where the 18th century philosophical idealism of George Berkeley is viewed as common sense[10] and "the doctrine of materialism" is considered a heresy, a scandal, and a paradox.[11] Through describing the languages of Tlön, the story also plays with the epistemological question of how language influences what thoughts are possible. The story also contains several metaphors for the way ideas influence reality. This last theme is first explored cleverly, by way of describing physical objects being willed into existence by the force of imagination, but later returns darker, as fascination with the idea of Tlön begins to distract people from paying adequate attention to the reality of earth.

Much of the story engages with the philosophical idealism of George Berkeley, who questioned whether it is possible to say that a thing exists if it is not being perceived. (Berkeley, an Anglican bishop, resolved that question to his own satisfaction by saying that the omnipresent perception of God ensures that objects continue to exist outside of personal or human perception.) Berkeley's philosophy privileges perceptions over any notion of the "thing in itself." Immanuel Kant accused Berkeley of going so far as to deny objective reality.

In the imagined world of Tlön, an exaggerated Berkeleian idealism without God passes for common sense. The Tlönian view recognizes perceptions as primary and denies the existence of any underlying reality. At the end of the main portion of the story, immediately before the postscript, Borges stretches this toward its logical breaking point by imagining that, "Occasionally a few birds, a horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater" by continuing to perceive it.[12] Besides commenting on Berkeley's philosophy, this and other aspects of Borges's story can be taken as a commentary on the ability of ideas to influence reality. For example, in Tlön there are objects known as hrönir[12] that arise when two different people find the "same" lost object in different places.

Borges imagines a Tlönite working his way out of the problem of solipsism by reasoning that if all people are actually aspects of one being, then perhaps the universe is consistent because that one being is consistent in his imagining. This is, effectively, a near-reconstruction of the Berkeleian God: perhaps not omnipresent, but bringing together all perceptions that do, indeed, occur.

This story is not the only place where Borges engages with Berkeleian idealism and with the related 20th century philosophy of phenomenology. Phenomenology privileges psychical phenomena over physical phenomena and "brackets off" objective reality as unknowable. In the world of Tlön, as in Borges's essay New refutation of time (1947), there is (as Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid comment) a "denial of space, time, and the individual I."[13] This worldview does not merely "bracket off" objective reality, but also parcels it separately into all its successive moments. Even the continuity of the individual self is open to question.

When Borges writes "The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth or even an approximation to it: they are after a kind of amazement. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature,"[14] he can be seen either as anticipating the extreme relativism that underlies some postmodernism or simply as taking a swipe at those who take metaphysics too seriously.

[stlukesguild]

Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and Hermann Hesse' Glass Bead Game

[Lord Macbeth]

I'll go out on a limb and say that the most philosophical work in the last century (and one of the most philosophical plays EVER) would have to be Waiting For Godot.

[.Kafka]

I very much agree with andresarpi, anything and everything by Borges.

[Aragorn Elessar]

I'll go out on a limb and say that the most philosophical work in the last century (and one of the most philosophical plays EVER) would have to be Waiting For Godot.

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart - two of the greatest actors of our time - were in a recent production of Waiting for Godot. Check it out if you haven't yet.

[Lord Macbeth]

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart - two of the greatest actors of our time - were in a recent production of Waiting for Godot. Check it out if you haven't yet.

Is there a recording of that, that was a live show...and I KNOW, that must've been AMAZING, stewart and McKellen are REAL actors...not the puffed-up Hollywood-type.

[Kyriakos]

Not sure how well they could play waiting for Godot though. Given that there are many different interpretations of what is really going on, the director would be crucial in the outcome.

[caddy_caddy]

I would really like to find an english copy of Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (Alive, Son Of Awake)

It is claimed to be the first philosophical novel and I am very interested in it, it is quite elusive though.
I am Syrian in decent but I do not have enough of my parent's language to read any non-english versions. :(

.

Oh, yeh it's amazing . I got a very special version of it -in Arabic-as a gift and it astonished me . I found it here per chance .
www.muslimphilosophy.com
Ibn Tufayl.
I am sure it would a very special read .

[Aragorn Elessar]

Is there a recording of that, that was a live show...and I KNOW, that must've been AMAZING, stewart and McKellen are REAL actors...not the puffed-up Hollywood-type.

Oh, sorry for not responding for a while. I looked on Youtube and couldn't find any video of it. Not in its entirety, anyway. Not sure where you could find it

[Theunderground]

Thus spoke Zarathustra seems to be the most overt philosophical novel,with ideas in it which are totally revolutionary. The most profound philosophical work i have read. And a stunning masterpiece of art,language and tone.
However,as a novel its not really a great read, can be difficult to understand,and i learnt much more from his other books.

[?NIETZSCHE'XIST]

i think that the prologue and part 1 make for most of the read. after part one nietzsche begins to over-do-it! i like reading his letters and notes. esp from the period of his heightened dementia!

[Theunderground]

Yes,i think the main thrust is in part one,then he repeats the musicality over the next two parts. And part four is more like a parable not to lose sight of your goal out of pity with other people.
I love nietzsches Anti-christ work. So intellectually awesome,humourus and full of passion. To be honest all of his work is great,and he remains the only philosopher i can read without falling alseep. I believe his work is second only to Fyodor D.

[ReadAll]

I wonder if I can include Boethius' 'Consolation of Philosophy'. Boethius wrote it during his yearlong imprisonment and it seeks to explain how evil can exist under a world governed by love (God), and it discusses how free will does NOT clash with predestination. I am so impressed by the fact that he not once mentions Christianity in the work...even though it's about the source 'of all good will'. It is, after all, not a consolation of religion... I strongly recommend it. It makes a very pleasant read, with his personfication of Philosophy as a Lady!

[OrphanPip]

Thus spoke Zarathustra seems to be the most overt philosophical novel,with ideas in it which are totally revolutionary. The most profound philosophical work i have read. And a stunning masterpiece of art,language and tone.
However,as a novel its not really a great read, can be difficult to understand,and i learnt much more from his other books.

I think it's a brilliant book, but it really is horrible as a novel. It makes Nietzsche's message unnecessarily obtuse, and it's not the clearest expression of his ideas. Kierkegaard had a similar style in some of his writing, I've only read excerpts of his work though.

For philosophical writing I've always favored the clear and concise argument, which is why I think so highly of Mill's writing.

[?NIETZSCHE'XIST]

i guess one would have to be a poet or artist of sorts in some way himself to actually understnad Zarathustra. Nietzsche did warn it is a book for All and None!