The Character Sketch as Philosophy

ABOUT

The Character Sketch as Philosophy: Manners, Mores, Types examines a genre that finds itself at the crossroads between literature, moral philosophy and the social sciences: the character type. Starting with its emergence in ancient Greece, in the work of Aristotle’s student, Theophrastus, the manuscript recovers the ethical and political work of this central literary device. Working on materials in ancient Greek, Latin, English and French, it shows how sketches of ordinary vices—from bad timing to flattery—were used to instil virtue in Hellenistic Athens, Lutheran Europe and seventeenth-century France. It reveals how this genre, when adapted by a crowd of anonymous writers during the English Civil War, furnished social knowledge of types in a moment of political crisis. This is a story that reaches its end in the work of David Hume, who argues that philosophers should move away from sketching characters, towards finding principles, bringing about the separation of moral philosophy from what we now call "literature."