A Comparative Analysis of William Godwin's Philosophical Treatise An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and His Novel Things as They Are, Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794): Including Reflections on the Relations Among Philosophy, Ethics, and Literature

The first part of this article is a comparative investigation of a philosophical treatise and a novel written at the same time by the same author, which manifest two types of discourse and cognition. The two texts are shown to illustrate two complementary types of cognition, cognition achieved by the exposition of rationally accessible facts and problems of the reality of the world in philosophy, and cognition achieved by the literary representation of a fictional analogue of the reality of the concerns of human life in literature. The case-study it is complemented by a discussion of essential theoretical points concerning the differentiation between philosophy and literature. Philosophy and literature are shown to share a consciousness of the problematic nature of ethical issues, which philosophy addresses by way of theoretical reflection and literature by disclosing the problematic nature of ethical issues within human contexts.