Samuel Taylor Coleridge frequently bridged the gap between British and European Romantic thought. This study sets Coleridge's mode of thinking within a German Romantic philosophical context as the place where his ideas can naturally extend themselves, stretch and find speculations of comparable ambition. It argues that Coleridge found his philosophical adventures in the dominant idiom of his times exciting and as imaginatively engaging as poetry. Paul Hamilton situates major themes in Coleridge's prose and poetic writings in relation to his passion for German philosophy. He argues that Coleridge's infectious attachment to German (post-Kantian) philosophy was due to its symmetries with the structure of his Christian belief. Coleridge is read as an excited and winning expositor of this philosophy's power to articulate an absolute grounding of reality. Its comprehensiveness, however, rendered redundant further theological description, undermining the faith it had seemed to support. Thus arose Coleridge's anxious disguising of his German plagiarisms, aspersions cast on German originality, and his claims to have already experienced their insights within his own religious sensibility or in the writings of Anglican divines and neo-Platonists. This book recovers the extent to which his ideas call to be expanded within German philosophical debate.

'PHILOSOPHY, or the doctrine and discipline of ideas' as S. T. Coleridge understood it, is the theme of this book. It considers the most vital and mature vein of Coleridge's thought to be the contemplation of ideas objectively, as existing powers. A theory of ideas emerges in critical engagement with thinkers including Plato, Plotinus, Böhme, Kant, and Schelling. A commitment to the transcendence of reason, central to what he calls the spiritual platonic old England, distinguishes him from his German contemporaries. The book also engages with Coleridge's poetry, especially in a culminating chapter dedicated to the Limbo sequence. This book pursues a theory of contemplation that draws from Coleridge's theories of imagination and the Ideas of Reason in his published texts and extensively from his thoughts as they developed throughout unpublished works, fragments, letters, and notebooks. He posited a hierarchy of cognition from basic sense intuition to the apprehension of scientific, ethical, and theological ideas. The structure of the book follows this thesis, beginning with sense data, moving upwards into aesthetic experience, imagination, and reason, with final chapters on formal logic and poetry that constellate the contemplation of ideas. Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy is not just a work of history of philosophy, it addresses a figure whose thinking is of continuing interest, arguing that contemplation of ideas and values has consequences for everyday morality and aesthetics, as well as metaphysics. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, scholars of religion, and of literature.

Revision of author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Chicago, 2008 under title: The word made flesh and the mazy page: symbol and allegory in Coleridge's philosophy of faith.

The first part of Goethe's dramatic poem Faust (1808), one of the great works of German literature, grabbed the attention of Byron and Percy Shelley in the 1810s, engaging them in a shared fascination that was to exert an important influence over their writings. In this comparative study, Ben Hewitt explores the links between Faust and Byron's and Shelley's works, connecting Goethe and the two English Romantic poets in terms of their differing, intricately related experiments with epic. In so doing, Hewitt enters the three writers into a literary and philosophical dialogue concerning 'epic' and 'tragic' perspectives on human knowledge and potential - perspectives crucial to the very structure and significance of Goethe's masterpiece - and illuminates hitherto unacknowledged affinities between these key figures in Romantic literature, and between British and German Romanticisms.

First Published in 1992, this encyclopedia is designed to survey the social, cultural and intellectual climate of English Romanticism from approximately the 1780s and the French Revolution to the 1830s and the Reform Bill. Focussing on ‘the spirit of the age’, the book deals with the aesthetic, scientific, socioeconomic – indeed the human – environment in which the Romantics flourished. The books considers poets, playwrights and novelists; critics, editors and booksellers; painters, patrons and architects; as well as ideas, trends, fads, and conventions, the familiar and the newly discovered. The book will be of use for everyone from undergraduate English students, through to thesis-driven graduate students to teaching faculty and scholars.

In this book Michael Di Fuccia examines the theological import of Owen Barfield's poetic philosophy. He argues that philosophies of immanence fail to account for creativity, as is evident in the false shuttling between modernity's active construal and postmodernity's passive construal of subjectivity. In both extremes subjectivity actually dissolves, divesting one of any creative integrity. Di Fuccia shows how in Barfield's scheme the creative subject appears instead to inhabit a middle or medial realm, which upholds one's creative integrity. It is in this way that Barfield's poetic philosophy gestures toward a theological vision of poiēsis proper, wherein creativity is envisaged as neither purely passive nor purely active, but middle. Creativity, thus, is not immanent but mediated, a participation in being's primordial poiēsis.

The Mind of the Master Class tells of America's greatest historical tragedy. It presents the slaveholders as men and women, a great many of whom were intelligent, honorable, and pious. It asks how people who were admirable in so many ways could have presided over a social system that proved itself an enormity and inflicted horrors on their slaves. The South had formidable proslavery intellectuals who participated fully in transatlantic debates and boldly challenged an ascendant capitalist ('free-labor') society. Blending classical and Christian traditions, they forged a moral and political philosophy designed to sustain conservative principles in history, political economy, social theory, and theology, while translating them into political action. Even those who judge their way of life most harshly have much to learn from their probing moral and political reflections on their times - and ours - beginning with the virtues and failings of their own society and culture.

This volume contains thirty new essays by leading experts on British philosophy in the nineteenth century, and provides a comprehensive and unrivalled resource for advanced students and scholars. As well as the most celebrated figures, such as Mill, Spencer, Sidgwick, and Bradley, the Handbook discusses many other less well-known names and debates from the period, such as Whewell, Shadworth Hodgson, and Martineau. The Handbook contains six parts: Part I examines logic and scientific method from Whately through to the advent of modern formal logic; Part II discusses some of the century's most famous metaphysical systems such as those of the Scottish Common Sense school, J. F. Ferrier and F. H. Bradley; Part III covers science and philosophy, paying particular attention to positivism and the impact of Darwin's evolutionary theory; Part IV explores ethical, social, and political thought, including the lesser known themes of feminism and British Socialism; Part V concerns religious philosophy; and Part VI examines the changes which took place in the practice of philosophy itself during the nineteenth-century. Prefaced by an introductory article which contextualises and relates the various themes and controversies of the century, each chapter provides an overview of the topic under consideration and surveys of the state of current research, while at the same time offering new ideas and suggestions for future interpretation.

The book will be of interest to students of autobiography and life writing as well as specialists in Romantic literature and Anglo-German literary relations. The book includes sections on Robinson and nineteenth-century autobiography, on the different stages of Robinson's five years in Germany, including his initial stay in Frankfurt; his personal friendships and first meeting with literary lions; his days as a Jena student and aspiring "literator"; his contacts with Weimar; and his role as a philosophical informant for Mme de Stael on her visit there; his return to England and the failure of his hopes of achieving the professional literary career that he had dreamed about in Germany. --Book Jacket.