David Foster Wallace, who briefly attended the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Harvard after writing a first-rate undergraduate philosophy thesis (published in December by Columbia University Press as “Fate, Time, and Language”), believed that fiction offered a way to capture the emotional mood of a philosophical work. The goal, as he explained in a 1990 essay in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, wasn’t to make “abstract philosophy ‘accessible’ ” by simplifying ideas for a lay audience, but to figure out how to recreate a reader’s more subjective reactions to a philosophical text. Unfortunately, Wallace declared his most overtly philosophical novel — his first, “The Broom of the System” (1987), which incorporates the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein — to be a failure in this respect. But he thought others had succeeded in writing “philosophically,” especially David Markson, whose bleak, abstract, solitary novel “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” (1988) he praised for evoking the bleak, abstract, solitary feel of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy.

Another of Wallace’s favorite novels was “Omensetter’s Luck” (1966), by William H. Gass, who received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell and taught philosophy for many years at Washington University in St. Louis. In an interview with The Paris Review in 1976, Gass confessed to feeling a powerful resistance to the analytical rigor of his academic schooling (“I hated it in lots of ways”), though he ultimately appreciated it as a kind of mental strength-training. Like Murdoch, he claimed that the influence of his philosophical education on his fiction was negligible. “I don’t pretend to be treating issues in any philosophical sense,” he said. “I am happy to be aware of how complicated, and how far from handling certain things properly I am, when I am swinging so wildly around.”

Unlike Murdoch, Gass and Wallace, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, whose latest novel is “36 Arguments for the Existence of God,” treats philosophical questions with unabashed directness in her fiction, often featuring debates or dialogues among characters who are themselves philosophers or physicists or mathematicians. Still, she says that part of her empathizes with Murdoch’s wish to keep the loose subjectivity of the novel at a safe remove from the philosopher’s search for hard truth. It’s a “huge source of inner conflict,” she told me. “I come from a hard-core analytic background: philosophy of science, mathematical logic. I believe in the ideal of objectivity.” But she has become convinced over the years of what you might call the psychology of philosophy: that how we tackle intellectual problems depends critically on who we are as individuals, and is as much a function of temperament as cognition. Embedding a philosophical debate in richly imagined human stories conveys a key aspect of intellectual life. You don’t just understand a conceptual problem, she says: “You feel the problem.”

If you don’t want to overtly feature philosophical ideas in your novel, how sly about it can you be before the effect is lost? Clancy Martin’s first novel, “How to Sell” (2009), a drug-, sex- and diamond-fueled story about a high-school dropout who works with his older brother in the jewelry business, was celebrated by critics as a lot of things — but “philosophical” was not usually one of them. Martin, a professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, had nonetheless woven into the story, which is at its heart about forms of deception, disguised versions of Kant’s argument on the supposed right to lie in order to save a life, Aristotle’s typology of four kinds of liars, and Nietzsche’s theory of deception (the topic of Martin’s Ph.D. dissertation). Not that anyone noticed. “A lot of my critics said: ‘Couldn’t put it down. You’ll read it in three hours!’ ” Martin told me. “And I felt like I put too much speed into the fastball. I mean, just because you can read it in three hours doesn’t mean that you ought to do so, or that there’s nothing hiding beneath the surface.”