Robert Musil Philosophy Without Qualities

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations

The artistic contributions of the Austrian novelist Robert Musil (1880-1942)--particularly his masterpiece The Man Without Qualities--are considered seminal works of the 20th century. Bence Nancy argues that Musil should also be considered an important philosopher. Musil was trained in philosophy (his Ph.D. thesis was on Ernst Mach) and gave up a promising career in academia when he found the novel a better vehicle for his philosophical ideas.

In Robert Musil: Philosophy without Qualities, Bence Nanay argues that Musil's writing reveals original and powerful philosophical views that philosophers today should take seriously. Nanay analyzes Musil's works through a philosophical lens to reveal Musil's contributions to essential questions of free will, moral responsibility, emotions, aesthetics, ethics, and more.

Written both for those that know Musil's writings as well as those new to his work, Robert Musil systematically makes a case for why it is not merely of historical interest but is deeply relevant to the problems and concerns of the 21st century.

Bence Nanay is Professor and Co-director of the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp. He received his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and is the author of six books with Oxford University Press on topics ranging from aesthetics to philosophy of mind and cognitive science. He is the winner of the Humboldt Foundation (Germany)'s Bessel Prize as well as the FWO (Belgium)'s Excellentieprijs, also known as the Belgian Nobel Prize. His work has been supported by prestigious grants, including two grants from the European Research Council.