These challenging essays defend Romanticism against its critics. They argue that Romantic thought, interpreted as the pursuit of freedom in concrete contexts, remains a central and exemplary form of both artistic work and philosophical understanding. Marshalling a wide range of texts from literature, philosophy and criticism, Richard Eldridge traces the central themes and stylistic features of Romantic thinking in the work of Kant, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hardy, Wittgenstein, Cavell and Updike. Through his analysis he shows that Romanticism is neither emptily literary (...) and escapist nor dogmatically optimistic and sentimental. This is the first serious philosophical defense of the ethical ideals of Romanticism and will appeal particularly to all professionals and students in philosophy, literature and aesthetics who are interested in what, philosophically, literature can show that philosophy cannot say. (shrink)

Developing work in the theories of action and explanation, Eldridge argues that moral and political philosophers require accounts of what is historically possible, while historians require rough philosophical understandings of ideals that merit reasonable endorsement. Both Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin recognize this fact. Each sees a special place for religious consciousness and critical practice in the articulation and revision of ideals that are to have cultural effect, but they differ sharply in the forms of religious-philosophical understanding, cultural criticism, and (...) political practice that they favor. Kant defends a liberal, reformist, Protestant stance, emphasizing the importance of liberty, individual rights, and democratic institutions. His fullest picture of movement toward a moral culture appears in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, where he describes conjecturally the emergence of an ethical commonwealth.Benjamin defends a politics of improvisatory alertness and consciousness-raising that is suspicious of progress and liberal reform. He practices a form of modernist, materialist criticism that is strongly rooted in his encounters with Kant, Hölderlin, and Goethe. His fullest, finished picture of this critical practice appears in One-Way Street, where he traces the continuing force of unsatisfied desires.By drawing on both Kant and Benjamin, Eldridge hopes to avoid both moralism and waywardness. And in doing so, he seeks to make better sense of the commitment-forming, commitment-revising, anxious, reflective and sometimes grownup acculturated human subjects we are. (shrink)

In this provocative new study, Richard Eldridge presents a highly original and compelling account of Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_, one of the most enduring yet enigmatic works of the twentieth century. He does so by reading the text as a dramatization of what is perhaps life's central motivating struggle—the inescapable human need to pursue an ideal of expressive freedom within the difficult terms set by culture. Eldridge sees Wittgenstein as a Romantic protagonist, engaged in an ongoing internal dialogue over the nature (...) of intentional consciousness, ranging over ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind. The picture of the human mind that emerges through this dialogue unsettles behaviorism, cognitivism, and all other scientifically oriented orthodoxies. Leading a human life becomes a creative act, akin to writing a poem, of continuously seeking to overcome both complacency and skepticism. Eldridge's careful reconstruction of the central motive of Wittgenstein's work will influence all subsequent scholarship on it. (shrink)

In _The Company We Keep_, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of _this_ particular encounter with _this_ particular work. Yet it will (...) give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation about _many_ kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us _as we read_? Who am I, _during the hours of reading or listening_? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: "friendship with books," "the exchange of gifts," "the colonizing of worlds," "the constitution of commonwealths." He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain. (shrink)

Richard Moran, Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self Knowledge.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature contains 23 newly commissioned essays by major philosophers and literary scholars that investigate literature ...

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art is a clear and compact survey of philosophical theories of the nature and value of art, including in its scope literature, painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture, movies, conceptual art and performance art. This second edition incorporates significant new research on topics including pictorial depiction, musical expression, conceptual art, Hegel, and art and society. Drawing on classical and contemporary philosophy, literary theory and art criticism, Richard Eldridge explores the representational, formal and expressive dimensions of (...) art. He argues that the aesthetic and semantic density of the work, in inviting imaginative exploration, makes works of art cognitively, morally and socially important. This importance is further elaborated in discussions of artistic beauty, originality, imagination and criticism. His accessible study will be invaluable to students of philosophy of art and aesthetics. (shrink)

This essay surveys and assesses Hegel’s general account of the role of crises in the formation of a culture of lived freedom. Ultimate resolution of crisis, according to Hegel, depends on a superintending divine agency that resolves the fractures, alienation, and competitive individualism of modern Enlightenment culture – a view that cannot be supported. Hegel’s specific analysis of that culture in the Phenomenology appears in the section on “Culturally Educated Spirit,” which includes his reading of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew. Following Alasdair (...) MacIntyre, I argue that there is no straightforward general way for human agents to avoid succumbing at least in part to Lui’s self-professed mercenary individualism. The result is a culture of generalized alienation and dissatisfaction, in which crises of opposition are all at once universal, irresolvable, and insignificant in playing no role in the achievement of meaningful freedom. Modern self-making is important, but its polymorphic and mutually opaque varieties threaten to overwhelm any possibilities of involvement in joint, meaningful activity. (In Sartre’s terms, hell is other people.) Despite this bleak diagnosis, however, I gesture, drawing on Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness, to possibilities of developing the skill of mutual appreciation, as an immanent teleology makes itself locally manifest within a relationship, surprisingly and in the face of crises of misunderstanding rooted in competitive-acquisitive individualism. (shrink)

Political thinking has appeared in many different circumstances, displayed many different styles, and argued for many different substantive commitments. Despite these differences, however, it is possible to isolate three broad traditions of style and substance within this thinking.

This chapter contrasts the broadly empirical, pluralist, and construction device–oriented approaches to film study of analytic philosophy of film with the broadly socially hermeneutic, artistically and politically avant-gardist stances of Continental film theory. Analytic philosophy of film has tended to focus on classic Hollywood films and continuity editing, in order to explore the achievements of these films as art, while Continental film theory frequently finds such films to be regressive and technically uninteresting. I explore in detail the work of such (...) analytically oriented film scholars as Cavell, Danto, Walton, Carroll, Wilson, Bordwell, Plantinga, and Wartenberg, among others, against the background of this broad divergence in styles of work. I conclude by suggesting possibilities of rapprochement between these two styles, possibilities that embrace both the insights of analytic philosophers concerning specific devices and effects of film construction and the insights of Continental theorists concerning human subject formation and human social, political, and artistic interests. (shrink)

In Literature, Life, and Modernity Richard Eldridge focuses on the question of a reader's or a viewer's response to a literary or dramatic work in a specific historical epoch ("modernity"). That is, in contrast with many other philosophical approaches to literature, he avoids fixing attention on any putative doctrinal (moral or political or diagnostic) claims in a literary work. Thereby, and in many other admirable ways, he avoids the danger of treating literature as philosophy manqué, concedes the distinctness of literary (...) experience, and only then asks about the significance of this experience. (In this way his approach is reminiscent to some extent of Schiller's; not bad company to be keeping.) This all amounts to a philosophy of literature of sorts,[1] but avoids a forced "philosophy in literature" or "literature as philosophy" treatment. There are themes and ideas at stake of course, but for distinct historical reasons, Eldridge also thinks of what he generally calls "modern" literature as characterized precisely by the absence of any thematic resolution, and so by a kind of play of possibilities, unsettledness, even homelessness. But, he argues, this is a play of ambiguity that. (shrink)

This essay first surveys Hölderlin’s mature philosophical sense of the human subject as caught ineluctably between abstract reflection and concrete receptivity, and it contrasts that sense briefly with the stances of Kant, Schiller, and Hegel. It then traces the consequences of this sense for Hölderlin’s poetology, and it concludes by showing how both this philosophical sense and this poetology are enacted in Hölderlin’s late, major fragment “Rousseau.”.

Hegel’s account of the unconscious and his broader philosophy of mind offer us a well worked out form of non-dualist, non-reductionist, non-eliminativist, non-representationalist naturalism. Hegel describes the development of discursively structured thought (and responsiveness to norms) in ethological terms as emerging from initial somatic-sensory states, from states and processes of bodily activity on the part of a feeling soul, and from structured habituation in relation to other subjects. Importantly, earlier, less organized states of sensory awareness and feeling persist as residues (...) underneath cognitive development in “the pit of imagination.” Imagistic and sensory-somatic materials from this pit can burst out, among other things, in dreams, madness, somnambulism, witty conversation, and puns. In the face of the permanent possibility of regressions from cognitive development, a continual activity of self-formation (Bildung) through art and participation in second nature is essential to maturity. (shrink)

It is a pleasure to respond to Paul Guyer’s rich, imaginative, and sound paper on perfectionist themes in Kant and Cavell in relation to moral and aesthetic education, just as it was instructive and pleasurable to read it. Overall, it is one of the best and most useful things I have read on Cavell, especially in deepening and enriching the insights of both Kant and Cavell by juxtaposing them against each other, rather than simply repeating the terminology of either alone. (...) I am going to do two things in response. First, I am going to survey, expand on, and endorse Guyer’s major claims. Second, while not denying the deep and important affinities between Kant and Cavell on which Guyer dwells, I am going to point to.. (shrink)

Philosophers concerned with self-understanding have often conceived of it as either a matter of immediate, unchallengeable introspective awareness or as a matter of gathering evidence about oneself scientifically and impersonally. In contrast, Gilbert Ryle rightly understood self-understanding as knowledge of one’s own commitments, desires, beliefs, wishes, and fears––all things that one has some share in forming and can to some extent alter. What Ryle misses or underplays, however, is the extent to which the forming and revising of commitments, desires, beliefs, (...) wishes, and fears are also social processes, as agents-in-formation are subject to the gazes, expectations, and evaluations of others. Jane Austen grasped all this very well, and in _Emma_ she gives us a picture of Emma’s partial, emotion-laden, and socially inflected—but also genuine—achievement of self-understanding from which we might do well to learn. (shrink)

Like other major modernist writers, Adorno sets himself against modern social formations, understood as deadening and evacuated of meaning. In Minima Moralia, he makes emphatic use of distinctively modernist literary techniques within philosophy as a form of writing. In focusing on particular circumstances of trauma and epiphany, he seeks to disclose in images the hollowness of modern life and to gesture toward life otherwise.

A book review of Lydia Goehr, Red Sea – Red Square – Red Thread: A Philosophical Detective Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, xlii + 677 pp. ISBN 9780197572443.

This chapter demonstrates the importance of close reading and criticism to the philosophy of poetry. Its reading of Ingeborg Bachman’s ‘Böhmen liegt am Meer’ explores the extent to which the poem is exemplary of the distinctive achievements of lyric poetry. The poem provides an object study in how the lyric allows the human voice to pursue, and at times acquire, expressive freedom. The various sonic, affective, rhythmic, figurative, and expressive devices of poetry account for why its products are not merely (...) lovely aesthetic objects but exemplary of the ‘imaginative economy of human life’. What lyric that aspires to this status shows us is the unique claim poetry has to providing what Stendhal called the promesse de bonheur. (shrink)

© Mind Association 2017Exactly how radical change in commitments on matters of fundamental concern is possible has been a problem since at least Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus and Augustine's rejection of Pelagianism and defence of divine grace. If an act of will is required to accept the offer of grace, then isn’t something important left to us to do? And if so, can or does reason play any role in such radical change? If so, how? Martin Warner (...) takes on these large questions in The Aesthetics of Argument. One modest way in which he gets his account started is to note, following Susan Haack, that ‘the intuition … that there is such a thing as favourable but not conclusive evidence … is stronger than … [the intuition] that there is such a thing as “inductive implication”’. That is, we apparently do make... (shrink)

The Rift in the Lute: Attuning Poetry and Philosophy. GaynesfordMaximilian De OUP. 2017. pp. 320. £50.00.

This chapter starts with the question of truth in literature, noting that this question has several interrelated senses: _can_ literature present (significant) truths at all?; _what_ does its presentation of truths (if it exists) have to do with its _manner_ of presentation (with literary language)?; and _is_ the presentation of truth a _central aim_ of literary art? The chapter surveys a variety of neo-Fregean (Lamarque and Olsen, Walton) views that reject the very possibility of literary truth as well as a (...) variety of anti-Fregean views (Goodman, Heidegger) that endorse it. But those endorsements often do not say enough about literary language and its grip on specific actualities. To move beyond this dispute, the chapter argues that Hegel, in his remarks on literary imagination in his _Lectures on Fine Art_, shows illuminatingly how literary writers sometimes arrive (and centrally aspire to arrive) at a distinctively poetic grasp of the world: _die poetische Auffassung der Welt_. (shrink)

These chapters describe and defend Cavell’s philosophical anthropology and critical-aesthetic practice. They situate that practice as both a response to and a furthering of an image of America as a site of futural freedom always to be achieved, and they extend Cavell’s practice into new readings of works of poetry, film, and music. In doing so, they show us how we might live with our shared modern condition more productively, through engagement with the affordances of art. Cavell’s own writing in (...) turn both describes and re-enacts this achievement, thus itself manifesting the powers of art in response to modern life and serving as a model of ‘knowing how to go on’ within its ambit. (shrink)