'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and the Ideas of Reason in his published texts and extensively from his thoughts as they developed throughout unpublished works, fragments, letters, and notebooks.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.

Coleridge and Contemplation is a multi-disciplinary volume on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, founding poet of British Romanticism, critic, and author of philosophical, political, and theological works. In his philosophical writings, Coleridge developed his thinking about the symbolizing imagination, a precursor to contemplation, into a theory of contemplation itself, which for him occurs in its purest form as a manifestation of 'Reason'. Coleridge is a particularly challenging figure because he was a thinker in process, and something of an omnimath, a Renaissance man of the Romantic era. The dynamic quality of his thinking, the 'dark fluxion' pursued but ultimately 'unfixable by thought', and his extensive range of interests make a philosophical yet also multi-disciplinary approach to Coleridge essential. This book is the first collection to feature philosophers and intellectual historians writing on Coleridge's philosophy. This volume opens up a neglected aspect of the work of Britain's greatest philosopher-poet--his analysis of contemplation, which he considered the highest of human mental powers. Philosophers including Roger Scruton, David E. Cooper, Michael McGhee, Andy Hamilton, and Peter Cheyne contribute original essays on the philosophical, literary, and political implications of Coleridge's views. The volume is edited and introduced by Peter Cheyne, and Baroness Mary Warnock contributes a foreword. The chapters by philosophers are supported by new developments in philosophically minded criticism from leading Coleridge scholars in English departments, including Jim Mays, Kathleen Wheeler, and James Engell. They approach Coleridge as an energetic yet contemplative thinker concerned with the intuition of ideas and the processes of cultivation in self and society. Other chapters, from intellectual historians and theologians, including Douglas Hedley, clarify the historical background, and 'religious musings', of Coleridge's thought regarding contemplation.

This book explores the sublime in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s later major prose in relation to more recent theories of the sublime. Building on the author’s previous monograph Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum, this study focuses on sublime theory and discourse in Coleridge’s other major prose texts of the 1820s: Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (wr. 1824), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829). This book thus ponders the constellations of aesthetics, literature, religion, and politics in the sublime theory and practice of this central Romantic author and three of his important successors: Julia Kristeva, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Rancière.

Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature is the first study to provide transhistorical perspectives and cutting-edge critical analyses of debates concerning idleness in English literature. The topicality of the subject is emphasized by two pieces of sociological analysis.

For seventy years, William Gillies has been seen as a placid painter of landscape and decorative still life. Andrew McPherson explodes this view to reveal a modernist whose response to the instabilities and violence of modernity touched universals of human experience. Gillies' idiom was shaped by institutions for artistic production unique to Scotland. But it was the politics of Scotland's connections to the rest of the British Isles that produced his mythic and misleading reputation.New paintings and new meanings are uncovered placing the micro-effects of modernity on mental health, family and community in the wider contexts of war, nationalism and public patronage. McPherson also shows how this changing world led Gillies towards new applications of modernist expression. Lavishly illustrated, and referencing almost one thousand works, this major reappraisal is an indispensable source on the cultural politics of a four-nation state and the reception of moder nism in Britain.

An original and profound exploration of contemplation from philosopher, theologian, and poet Kevin Hart. In Lands of Likeness, Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world.

The Development of Anglican Moral Theology is the successor volume to The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology. It describes how Anglican theologians interacted closely with the moral philosophers of their day while providing a pastoral resource in the fast-changing period between 1680-1950. The book shows how vibrant and intellectually rigorous the tradition was, and includes detailed studies of the sermons of Butler, Wesley and Newman, the writings of William Law and Coleridge, and the later work of Maurice, Gore, Scott Holland, Moberly, William Temple and Kirk. This is the first account of this lively tradition of moral theology.

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 God's primordial poiēsis.

Reconstructing the literary and philosophical reaction to Adam Smith's dictum that man is a labouring animal above and before all else, this study explores the many ways in which Romantic writers presented idle contemplation as the central activity in human life. By contrasting the British response to Smith's political economy with that of contemporary German Idealists, Richard Adelman also uses this consideration of the importance of idleness to Romantic aesthetics to chart the development of a distinctly British idealism in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Exploring the work of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Schiller, William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft and many of their contemporaries, this study pinpoints a debate over human activity and capability taking place between 1750 and 1830, and considers its social and political consequences for the cultural theory of the early nineteenth century.

How and to what extent did women writers shape and inform the aesthetics of Romanticism? Were undervalued genres such as the romance, gothic fiction, the tale, and the sentimental and philosophical novel part of a revolution leading to newer, more democratic models of taste? Fiona Price takes up these important questions in her wide-ranging study of women's prose writing during an extended Romantic period. While she offers a re-evaluation of major women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith, Price also places emphasis on less well-known figures, including Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Hamilton and Priscilla Wakefield. The revolution in taste occasioned by their writing, she argues, was not only aesthetic but, following in the wake of British debates on the French Revolution, politically charged. Her book departs from previous studies of aesthetics that emphasize the differences between male and female writers or focus on higher status literary forms such as the treatise. In demonstrating that women writers' discussion of taste can be understood as an intervention at the most fundamental level of political involvement, Price advances our understanding of Romantic aesthetics.