Shakespeare's Hamlet Philosophical Perspectives

Does philosophy gain or lose when it is embedded within literature or embodied by drama? Does literary criticism gain or lose when it turns to literary works as occasions for abstract reflection? Leading literary scholars and philosophers interrogate philosophical dimensions of Shakespeare's Hamlet with these urgent questions in view.
Scholars probe Hamlet's own insights, assess the significance of philosophy's literary-dramatic framing by this play, and trace the philosophically-relevant underpinnings revealed by historical transformations in Hamlet's reception. They focus on the play's thematizations of subjectivity, knowledge, sex, grief, self-theatricalization.
Examining Shakespeare's play from a philosophical standpoint sharpens the questions the play itself so famously poses: What counts as a proper response to injustice upon realizing that whatever one does, there can be no undoing of the initial wrong? What do our commitments to the dead amount to? How to persist in infusing significance into action while grasping the degradation of death and our own replaceability? Scholars at the forefront of their fields tackle these and other questions from a wide range of viewpoints, illuminating the central concerns of one of Shakespeare's masterpieces.

Tzachi Zamir is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Zamir is the author of Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton, 2006), Ethics and the Beast (Princeton, 2007), and Acts: Theater, Philosophy and the Performing Self (The University of Michigan Press, 2014). He is also the author of Ascent: Philosophy and Paradise Lost, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Series Editor's Foreword, Richard Eldridge
Editor's Introduction, Tzachi Zamir

Chapter 1. On (Not) Making Oneself Known John Gibson
Chapter 2. Staging Wisdom through Hamlet Paul Woodruff
Chapter 3. Philosophical Sex David Hillman
Chapter 4. Self-uncertainty as self-realization Paul A. Kottman
Chapter 5. Hamlet's "Now" of Inward Being Sanford Budick
Chapter 6. To Thine Own Selves be True-ish: Shakespeare's Hamlet as Formal Model Joshua Landy
Chapter 7. "Unpacking the heart": Why it is impossible to say "I love you" in Hamlet's Elsinore David Schalkwyk
Chapter 8. Hamlet's Ethics Sarah Beckwith
Chapter 9. Interpreting Hamlet: The Early German Reception Kristin Gjesdal