This chapter is focused on a battle in the Athenian law-court between two great orators. Aeschines was trained as a tragic actor who worked in a mask, and brought the skills of the stage to the democratic arena. He argued for making peace with the new rising imperial power, Macedon, and tried to persuade the jury to position themselves as authentic democrats. Demosthenes was a skilled writer who wrote speeches for others, and later learnt how to present himself as a public speaker. He won the debate for two reasons. He persuaded the jury to position themselves in nationalistic terms as Athenians, and he also persuaded them that he was sincere while his opponent was merely acting. The reputation of Demosthenes has undergone many changes, and it was only in the nineteenth century that he emerged as an archetypal democrat. In Demosthenes’ day the drive for sincerity was tied to a shift from communitarian thinking to a higher degree of individualism, in a political context where the city was losing its power of self-determination. I end by drawing on Peter Brook’s minimalist definition of theatre to create a definition of democracy.

Some degree of hypocritical conformity is necessary, Spinoza argues, for a political society to function. Individuals cannot be free to do whatever they like, even if their conscience conflicts with the law. Yet Spinoza also recognizes that hypocritical conformity has its own pernicious repercussions, specifically the corrosion of civic trust. Spinoza’s conscientious speech warns that conformity corrodes the social trust that undergirds politics since individuals are not able to confidently assess the sincerity of their citizens. Spinoza aims to reconcile this tension by distinguishing speech from action. Dissenters must conform to the law, even if it conflicts with their conscience, but they should be able to express their conscience freely in speech.

Adam Kelly has persuasively argued that Wallace’s oeuvre should be understood through the prism of New Sincerity, which is to say a late- or post-postmodernist quest to balance cynicism with a return to what Wallace called “single-entendre principles.” While the new sincerity paradigm is not without its critics, sincerity is indisputably central to Wallace’s ethical system, and its personal and authorial challenges provide some of the most compelling moments in his writing. The apparent sincerity of his authorial voice has been one of his most appealing attributes, and Wallace himself commented frequently on the fraught dynamic between author and reader, simultaneously predicated on sincerity and manipulation. This chapter traces the role of sincerity as, on the one hand, a sort of artistic telos for Wallace and, on the other, an endlessly thorny problem that springs up in every facet of contemporary life. The chapter goes on to highlight Wallace’s influence in contemporary fiction, highlighting Karl Ove Knausgaard as an author who explores similar questions.

The work of David Foster Wallace can be seen to critically renew ideas and concerns from existentialist philosophy and literature. Wallace repeatedly expressed his admiration of existentialist authors, and his fiction contains many explicit and implicit references to their writings. This chapter will provide an overview of the main themes and intertextual connections that Wallace’s work shares with the existentialists, such as a comparison with Sartre’s view of consciousness, Kierkegaard’s critique of irony, and Camus’s relation of meaningful existence to community; also, a brief comparative reading of the opening of Infinite Jest and Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” of “The Depressed Person” and Beauvoir’s “The Monologue,” and of “B.I. #20” and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Overall, Wallace shares with these authors the conviction that philosophy and literature are partially overlapping activities, that some philosophical problems are best approached through literature, and that their works therefore blur the boundaries between these modes of writing.

Chapter 6 discusses how trust can emerge in the formal political sphere. Engaging with arguments for “political friendship” and “salutary hypocrisy,” this chapter shows that a division of labour between “principled pragmatists” and “principled purists” can counteract the institutionalized enmity problem. Principled pragmatists can develop a sense of reciprocity by engaging in some forms of hypocrisy and by striking compromises; this reciprocity can counteract the tendency for political actors to compete as enemies. Meanwhile, principled purists can more stubbornly refuse to compromise in order to keep principled pragmatists honest. There are times, however, when the distribution of principled pragmatists across mainstream parties is unbalanced, just as there are times when some (former) mainstream liberal democrats have forged enduring alliances with autocratic political actors. Accordingly, the chapter argues that in these circumstances, those who stand outside of these “unholy alliances” must embrace contestation and show that participation in these alliances is politically disadvantageous.

The introduction summarizes overall argument unfolding through the six main chapters of the book and provides basic motivation for pursuing the pragmatist considerations of the volume. It emphasizes that the concept of truth may seem to have become seriously threatened in our culture - especially due to familiar political events and the active use of the social media today. As pragmatism, particularly Jamesian pragmatism, might be considered partly responsible for these developments, a novel critical exploration of pragmatist resources for dealing with the issues concerning the responsible pursuit of truth across a wide range of human practices is needed. The introduction also offers preliminary reasons why the argument of the book moves through a rather complex discussion of Kantian transcendental philosophy (and transcendental pragmatism) instead of merely "directly" utilizing the classical pragmatists' views on truth as such.

This brief concluding chapter summarizes the argument of the volume and draws attention to a chief outcome of the entire book, viz., pragmatic transcendental humanism. It is also briefly considered in what sense the discussion of the book is committed to (pragmatist) project of metaphysics and why exactly this pragmatist undertaking needs the kind of Kantian transcendental backing that the earlier chapters argue it does.

On the surface, the ethical vocabulary of stylistic virtue reflects the fact that moral and stylistic virtues overlap. A “manly” style may connote masculine strength, just as an “honest” author may promise fidelity in representation. However, the “aesthetic” critics of the mid- to late-nineteenth century did not disavow this seemingly moralistic lexicon. Instead, Chapter 2 shows how the doubleness of stylistic virtues made them appealing to critics who sought to provide an ethical justification for formalist methods. By tracing the theory of stylistic virtue in the four Victorian critics most influenced by Aristotle – John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde – it reveals a process of “ethico-aesthetic drift” whereby “ethical character” was increasingly understood as an aesthetic phenomenon that had autonomous value. As literary criticism came to be seen as a creative act on a par with the production of art, it too became an ethically valuable act, investing style and its appreciation with an unprecedented level of attention and esteem.

Mary Wollstonecraft challenges the social disablement of women by promoting a vigorous and curative feminism that establishes women’s qualifications for equality by virtue of their capacities. She associates female weakness with inutility and social degradation and promotes bodily and physical independence as ideals. Misogynistic cultures weaken the bodies and minds of women, Wollstonecraft asserts, and she petitions for women to develop (and be permitted to develop) their physical and intellectual abilities rather than to perpetuate a culture that is focused on the aesthetics of women’s bodies. Significantly, she suggests that it is absurd that weakness is treated as something aesthetically desirable in women. She concludes that society cannot maintain women’s social inutility as an aesthetic, as it is detrimental to social progress. Wollstonecraft’s implied theory of deformity (which links it to moral degradation) is articulated through its acknowledged opposite, beauty. These views are, however, incompatible with the compassion, sympathy, and sensibility Wollstonecraft expresses when considering deformity more directly.

In early modern England the theory of the emotions set out in classical rhetoric provides a context for understanding how they work in Shakespeare which is at least as important as Galenic humoral theory. The key concepts that link oratory and drama are ethos and pathos, where ethos may be understood in terms of character delineation and pathos as the emotion which character representation is intended to arouse in the audience. The key term used to describe the way rhetoric works on an audience is movere, ‘moving’. Rhetoric provided Shakespeare with a model of how to move the affections of his audience, but there are many points in his plays that reveal an awareness of the dangers of rhetoric – that the obvious deployment of artifice risks sounding insincere – and it is this that lies behind his development of more naturalistic forms of expression in his drama. This is also what lies behind the construction of Shakespeare’s reputation as the supreme exponent of the passions in the 150 years after his death, as ‘nature’ became the third term in the relationship between rhetoric and the emotions and the essential principle on which ‘moving’ is based.

Chapter 3 explores the language of confessions to explain how language affected religious practices. Ministers expected all confessions to use a feminized language of submission and humility. However, laymen diverged from the language prescribed by the clergy to accept a more masculine language for male confessants. In the public space of the meetinghouse, where laymen confessed their sins, they could not risk their masculine reputations by adopting a feminized verbal order espoused by the clergy. Women were the normative Puritans who fully adopted the language and demeanor of a feminized faith. Men created a more masculine verbal order that focused on their behavior instead of their souls. Through this practice, the disciplinary process reinforced male duty and female piety, which ultimately gendered Puritanism.

Discussing works by Robert Coover and David Foster Wallace, this chapter argues that the critical remediation of TV’s aesthetics of immediacy provided an innovative impetus for the experimental postmodernist fiction of the 1960s and 70s and the literary fiction of the 1980s and 90s. Among the first generation of writers to address TV, Coover parodies in his short story “The Babysitter” how TV conflates the fictive and the real by eroding the boundaries between on- and off-screen worlds. The story plays with narrative levels to debunk TV’s logic of spectacle and consumption. Twenty years later, Wallace likewise explores how TV alters our sense of the real. Yet he distances himself from the ironical stance he finds characteristic of both his postmodernist precursors and of TV. In his essay “E Unibus Pluram” and short stories like “Little Expressionless Animals,” he advocates a return to a self-reflexive poetics of sincerity. Although their poetics and historical moment differ, both Coover and Wallace rework televisual immediacy effects to challenge TV’s promise of direct participation and connection and to expand the representational reach and cultural pertinence of literature.

Very brief prelude in lieu of an introduction, surveying the two main scholarly approaches to the collection: one focused Ovid’s literary artistry, allusive complexity, etc., the other on his exposé (whether serious or simply amusing) of the morally problematic character of the lover; proposes to resist the temptation of intertextuality along with the distancing strategy of moral critique.