Joana Corrêa Monteiro

Art, philosophy, and intellectual activity in general have been described as having social and political importance for centuries by artists, philosophers, critics, and all kinds of intellectuals. Some of the disheartening—but, to a degree, predictable, even if remote—consequences of such claims are the current labelling of works like Kant’s Critique as potentially harmful and offensive or the recent disappearing of names like Flannery O’Connor’s from university halls. The urge to do such things has multiple origins, with diverse degrees of seriousness, and the importance of social media fury, often combined with ignorance and sometimes with political and ideological agendas, should not be underestimated. But it is noteworthy that these tendencies have risen after several late twentieth-century literary scholars and moral philosophers argued that literature has a specific role either in moral philosophy, in morality or both, with assertions that could be easily extended to art, intellectual activity, politics and the social life.