Academic Writing, Philosophy and Genre

Philosophical texts display a variety of literary forms. There are many different philosophical genres that have developed over the years which are peculiar to and transcend their age: letters, the treatise, the thesis, the confession, the meditation, the allegory, the essay, the soliloquy, the symposium, the consolation, the commentary, the disputation, and the dialogue, to name a few. These forms of philosophy have conditioned and become the basis of academic writing (and assessment) within both the university and higher education more generally. Since the cultural, linguistic (discursive), and practice turns of the 1970s and in subsequent decades greater attention has been paid to the relations between academic writing, genres and philosophy, and also to questions of style, genre, form and their historicity and materiality. These essays explore these themes in relation to questions of philosophical writing, the relation of philosophy to literature, and reading the other.