Yes and no. On the one hand, yes, of course, because you have received the content and presumably gained all or most of the benefits that one gets by reading the book, such as the moral lessons, the aesthetic insights, the entertainment value, the psychological insights, etc. And remember that before printing presses, almost all knowledge and stories were transmitted orally. The only reason you could not claim to have read it is that you did not read it. And there are some differences between getting information by reading it and by hearing it and some advantages of each.

In short, if someone is daft enough to complain that you didn't really read a book after you've spent hours listening to it, ask them if they'd make the same complaint to a blind person (or to someone who sat through Homer's telling of The Iliad or to someone who saw a Shakespeare play performed). And then ask them if they ever read the book...

Here's a somewhat differently slanted view -- in favour, perhaps, of being a bit "daft"! :-)

No matter how many times I read three-year old Daisy her favourite book, no matter how well she knows it by heart, she hasn't read it herself. She can't read.

No matter how many times the adult illiterate listens to a tape a complete reading of e.g. Bleak House, no matter how well he knows the book as a result, he hasn't actually read it. He can't read either. (The blind person who can read braille, of course, can read Bleak House.)

The audiences that heard bards sing The Iliad were fortunate indeed. But most never read it. They couldn't read. (And what about audiences before it was written down?) Similarly for the groundlings at early performances of Shakespeare.

There's a difference between having read a work and knowing it well. You can read something without, as a result, remembering a word (as on long haul flights!); and you can know it very well without ever reading it.

Sure, since we tend to assume that reading and a certain acquaintance with a book go together, we do loosely ask "have you read X?" when we mean "do you know X?", or some such. But still, loose talk is loose talk. And listening to a classic book on tape, unabridged, is not sufficient to be able to claim to have read it. An illiterate person would plainly not be telling the truth in saying that he had read Bleak House after listening to a tape, since he can't read.

Thanks for your nice question. It contains many components and I won't be able to respond to all of them. One reason is that I'm hesitant to offer generalizations about literature across the board. Instead, it comes in many genres and sub-genres, and plays different kinds of roles in different cultures. One place you might look for more discussion of these issues is a collection of essays on the "philosophy of literature", here: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405141700,descCd-description.html. One of the questions that that volume addresses is the question of what kind of knowledge we can get from literature, and how far that knowledge extends. I take it that this is relevant to your concerns because I'm assuming that if you were a journalist writing for a newspaper, there wouldn't be a big issue about whether someone can learn from what you write. So long as you're not making things up, we can learn about what's going on in, say French politics from your articles. By contrast, if a writer writes fiction, how can we learn anything from that?

As I say, I'm wary of generalizations here, but one point that might help is that if you reflect on it, you'll see that we learn from "fictions" all the time: consider the case of my *supposing* something for the sake of argument. I might ask, "What if we arrange all these books alphabetically by author--won't that make it easier to find them?" And we might agree that it will. Notice that what's in the scope of 'what if' is a tiny fiction--I'm not putting it forth as true. After contemplating the question, we can *learn* something, namely that if we organize those books that way, that will save time finding books in the future. I know this is banal, but I think the model generalizes to more complex cases, to wit:

My suggestion is that sometimes in literature, the author is treating his her characters, staging, background, and so on, as all like a comparatively more complex "what if". Huxley: what if we lived on soma, in a society that was totally centrally controlled all the way down to our sex lives..." Then much of the rest of that book is an exploration of the consequences of that question. In light of that exploration, we can see that a certain sort of social formation would be truly terrible. Or Ursula Le Guin: what if people changed gender regularly? How would that affect our relationships with others? And one who reads this learns something about at the very least herself by contemplating that prospect. I'm sure you can think of other cases (*many* more than I could), some of which explore issues about personal relationships, war, morality, death, and so on.

I don't claim that all literature conforms to this model. And I don't claim that this is the only way in which we can learn from someone else's literary work. But your question was, I think, how it's possible to learn at all from fiction, and this is *one* answer. Accordingly, I'm not comfortable talking about "the sense of literature", since I suspect there are very many senses, but one function or value of literature is as a way of sharing knowledge. If this is correct, it would help us understand part of our reason for valuing so highly the sort of work that you do.

Yes. Lots.

That's the easy answer. The hard answer is explaining how we could possibly learn anything true from a series of false statements. One answer is that good works of fiction use false statements to describe deep truths about human nature, emotions, relationships, morality, and the meaning of life. They do so by creating a world of characters and events that does not actually exist but that shares enough common features with our world that we can learn from them. Most importantly, the fictions may share the deep (and general) truths about human nature, etc. with our world, and they may do so because the writer has a deep understanding of these truths.

Fiction also explores the boundaries of the possible and teaches us to think about these possibilities. Philosophy often works in this way. By considering what is possible but not actual we learn something about our world and ourselves. Science fiction and philosophical thought experiments sometimes differ only in that the science fiction tends to be better developed and better written.

You understand the subject correctly, I believe. The study of literature has not always been done in this way, and is not done the same way everywhere. Saying that, the study of the way literature achieves meaning and certain effects, and the relation of these to the social or intellectual climate of the time, is a dominant way of doing things. Thus, for the most part, the study of literature is the study of how literature 'works', and not the validity of any ideas it contains.

However, it's not entirely lacking in usefulness! The study of literature might unveil subtle rhetorical ploys used to make an implausible idea seem self-evident; also it might (like history) help us to understand where ideas come from, why they were believed; finally, it might help us to understand the significance ideas have in people's lives, in part by dramatising how the consequences of beliefs or actions play out. All of these things are philosophically valuable.

A fascinating set of questions. Let me start by distinguishing at least two: 1. the issue of 'entwined' lives and their relation to individual autonomy. 2. The implications of this for 'ownership' of autobiographies.

The first of these is only a problem if we start with the assumption that everything that happens (in the human world) must belong to one and only one agent. As the saying goes, 'it takes two to tango'. You wouldn't have been 'free' to write about a relationship if there hadn't been another person! You were, in a sense, co-authors and co-owners of the events of the relationship.

The second question is more difficult. In fact, I think the example of the joint blog is not really appropriate. A blog is in the public domain, and is thus not a 'secret'. Your blog has been taken down but then the real moral issue is about respecting the wishes of someone who has changed their mind, and not about my 'ownership' of my own life. A better example would be intimate secrets that were never made public, and where the question of making them public never previously arose. Only then does the problem of my freedom to do what I like with the events of my own life arise in a pure way. However, the answer to the first question suggests that there is no paradox in saying that the events of your life belong to you and to other people.

So, I think you are right to feel moral qualms. Events of the relationship (such as writing a diary) are co-owned, even if you did the writing, and thus you have a responsibility to your ex-partner. Of course, the purpose behind disclosure might matter (making public the diary as part of a legal proceedings of some gravity, for example, might be morally compelling). Certainly, I would ask permission.

To add to Kalynne's answer, once you have identified a work of philosophy "broadly speaking," a useful thing to do is to reflect on whether or not that specific work is likely to meet your specific objectives for engaging with philosophy -- that question can be much more useful, I think, than simply understanding whether a given work can rightly be categorized as a work of philosophy.

Reading and reflecting on Pirsig, working your way through an introductory text, browsing within the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and reading a set of specialized journal articles on a narrow topic each involve engagement with philosophy under one or another conception of what philosophy is, and each offer different opportunities for learning and growth. As you read around, you will get a sense of which types of texts offer which kinds of opportunities, and you may also get a better sense of which opportunities matter the most to you.

I'm hard pressed to answer this question (and I suspect I'm not the only one, seeing as it's been so long unanswered) without knowing more precisely what you mean by "tell the truth." A work of literature can be said to have various meanings, some of them mutually exclusive, and few (if any) constraints on viable interpretations. So in that sense, it would tell the truth, because the range of what it "tells" is so very broad. But it would be the same with the visual arts, wouldn't it?

If "telling the truth" is understood to be some kind of correspondence with an external state of affairs, then it seems other areas of knowledge (mathematics, for instance) would "tell the truth" better.

Aesthetics isn't my area, and so far I'm only dabbling in Phil of Literature; I'm afraid I can't do better than this for an answer. But it is an intriguing start to a conversation. I hope you pursue it.

Poetry can certainly be used to express profound ideas and attitudes concerning (for want of a better expression) 'the human condition'. These ideas can affect the reader's soul in a powerful way, helped along by the captivating power of the medium itself. And examples of poetry that might be regarded as 'philosophical' in this sense are innumerable. Indeed, one might make a case for claiming that it's the norm rather than the exception, and that this is the primary aspiration of most of the greatest poetry in history, from Homer to Dante to Sylvia Plath.

But does this really count as philosophy? For some people, this is precisely what the best and most important kind of philosophy consists in. For others, however, and particularly within English-speaking academia, philosophy is more a matter of highly technical and abstract theories about the structure of reality, the nature of cognition, and things of that sort. And yet, as it turns out, those kinds of theories have been explored in verse form too. One might compare this with the way in which philosophers from Plato to Berkeley to David Lewis have opted to present their ideas and arguments in the form of witty dialogues. Either approach brings, among other potential advantages, that of simply engaging the reader more effectively than yet another dry prose treatise might.

For an example, consider Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, an epic poem in six books from the first century BC. Lucretius set out and argued for, among other things: an atomistic physics, a plurality of worlds and extraterrestrial life, a theory of natural selection, a materialist account of the mind, a vigorous critique of religion, an account of the origins of human society out of a state of nature, a study of meteorology, and, believe it or not, a discussion of sexual positions. And all in Latin verse. Admittedly, that was then and this is now. Professional philosophers and scientists tend not to express themselves in verse any more -- I can't think of any recent examples (though perhaps others might). But, even into the early modern period, they were still doing so. See, for instance, the book-length philosophical poems, Nosce Teipsum by Sir John Davies (1599) or Psychodia Platonica by Henry More (1642). Some of the scansion and rhyme might have been a bit dodgy, but these authors did nevertheless feel that verse was an appropriate medium for the expression of serious metaphysical and epistemological theories and arguments. There's certainly no incompatibility between the poetic medium and even the most technical kind of philosophy.