Counterfactuality is currently a hotly debated topic. While for some disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive science, or psychology counterfactual scenarios have been an important object of study for quite a while, counterfactual thinking has in recent years emerged as a method of study for other disciplines, most notably the social sciences. This volume provides an overview of the current definitions and uses of the concept of counterfactuality in philosophy, historiography, political sciences, psychology, linguistics, physics, and literary studies. The individual contributions not only engage the controversies that the deployment of counterfactual thinking as a method still generates, they also highlight the concept's potential to promote interdisciplinary exchange without neglecting the limitations and pitfalls of such a project. Moreover, the essays from literary studies, which make up about half of the volume, provide both a historical and a systematic perspective on the manifold ways in which counterfactual scenarios can be incorporated into and deployed in literary texts.

The philological and philosophical-aesthetic research area on Literature and Knowledge is very complex. The contributions of this book provide a survey of this research area and develop approaches to evaluate current theories and methods. Thus, the variety of case studies is supplemented by a primarily theoretically oriented perspective. The book covers, among other things, the explication of the key terms literature and knowledge and the classification of knowledge transfer to the functional spectrum of (fictional) literature. The various contributions give a basic overview of this complex research area."