Don Quixote

This chapter addresses how Cervantes uses humour to treat philosophical issues, or in ways that invite philosophical analysis, in Don Quixote. There are at least five ways in which philosophy appears. First, there is Cervantes’s familiarity with philosophical and his use of them in his writings. Second, the thoughts, statements, and acts of Cervantes’s hero position him in various philosophical stances. Third, the employment by literary critics of more recent philosophical developments as they read Cervantes’s novel. Fourth, we find philosophers of later generations analysing Cervantes’s novel in ways that suggest new philosophical readings of it. Fifth, we discover that certain ideas in Don Quixote anticipate future philosophical developments. This chapter shows that one of the reasons for the apparent modernity of Don Quixote is Cervantes’s comprehension of the philosophical past and his eventual escape from its grasp through his intellectual strategies, which are anticipatory of our own period.