Romanticism Hermeneutics And The Crisis Of The Human Sciences

The human sciences established and developed in the nineteenth century have slowly disintegrated. It is an ironic end. It was in the name of the greater legitimacy of more universal psychological criteria that its architects disavowed the traditional theological standard for valuing and evaluating human words and deeds. With hindsight, we can see that universality was indeed gained, but only at the cost of alienating any sense of common legitimacy. Harold Bloom, defending the canon largely in the humanising, 'moral sense' convention of critics operating since Matthew Arnold, has resolutely maintained the common legitimacy of aesthetic value against the claims of particular interest groups. But the very universality attached to aesthetic value is at odds with the world of common sense, and thus lies at the root of the problem. To complicate matters, this universality has been understood as a traditional criterion. A more radical treatment of the subject is needed. This study begins by surveying the field of modern hermeneutics. Noting its repeated crises of self-legitimisation, it traces these to circular beliefs bequeathed by Romanticism that human nature is self-begetting, and can thus be known intimately and autonomously. After providing a historical overview of how human nature had been understood, the focus shifts to the attack in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria on Wordsworth's 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and to a reading of some key Romantic texts. It reads Coleridge's famous definition of the imagination as an attack on Romantic hermeneutics, rooted in the traditional view that man has been created in Imago Dei.

This set reissues 28 books on Romanticism originally published between 1940 and 2006. Routledge Library Editions: Romanticism provides an outstanding collection of scholarship which explores not only Romantic literature but the Romantic Movement as a whole, including art, philosophy and science.

The Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 to further the scientific study of consciousness, but it arose in the surf of a larger cultural need. Victorians were on the hunt for self-understanding. Mesmerists, spiritualists, and other romantic seekers roamed sunken landscapes of entrancement, and when psychology was finally ready to confront these altered states, psychical research was adopted as an experimental vanguard. Far from a rejected science, it was a necessary heterodoxy, probing mysteries as diverse as telepathy, hypnosis, and even séance phenomena. Its investigators sought facts far afield of physical laws: evidence of a transcendent, irreducible mind. The New Prometheans traces the evolution of psychical research through the intertwining biographies of four men: chemist Sir William Crookes, depth psychologist Frederic Myers, ether physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, and anthropologist Andrew Lang. All past presidents of the society, these men brought psychical research beyond academic circles and into the public square, making it part of a shared, far-reaching examination of science and society. By layering their papers, textbooks, and lectures with more intimate texts like diaries, letters, and literary compositions, Courtenay Raia returns us to a critical juncture in the history of secularization, the last great gesture of reconciliation between science and sacred truths.

If we could ask a Romantic reader of new poetry in 1820 to identify the most celebrated poet of the day after Byron, the chances are that he or she would reply with the name of Barry Cornwall'. Solicitor, dandy and pugilist, Cornwall -- pseudonym of Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874) -- published his first poems in the Literary Gazette in late 1817. By February 1820, under the tutelage of Keats's mentor, Leigh Hunt, Cornwall had produced three volumes of verse. Marcian Colonna sold 700 copies in a single morning, a figure exceeding Keats's lifetime sales. Hazlitt's suppressed anthology, Select British Poets (1824), allocated Cornwall nine pages -- the same number as Keats, and more than Southey, Lamb or Shelley; Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine pronounced Cornwall a poet of 'originality and genius'; and in 1821, Gold's London Magazine announced that in terms of 'tenderness and delicacy' even Percy Shelley was 'surpassed very far indeed by Barry Cornwall'. It is difficult to square Cornwall's early nineteenth-century popularity with his subsequent neglect. In Bright Stars Richard Marggraf Turley concentrates on Cornwall's phenomenonal success between 1817 and 1823, emphatically returning an important and unjustly neglected Romantic author to critical focus. Marggraf Turley explores Cornwall's rivalry -- and at various junctures, political camaraderie -- with fellow Hunt protégé Keats, whose career exists in a fascinatingly mirrored relationship with his own trajectory into celebrity. The book argues that Cornwall helped to structure Keats's experience as a poet but also explores the central question of how Cornwall's racy and politically subversive poetry managed to establish a broad readership where Keatss similarly indecorous publications met with review hostility and readerly indifference.

Published in 1997, this volume is written from a hermenutico-phenomenological point of view. The essays cover a spectrum of relevant issues: the essential interpretation of science; the possibility of a "strong hermeneutics of science" that takes into consideration science's cognitive structure; the implications of existential-ontological interpretations of science for the post-metaphysical dialogue between hermeneutics and epistomology; the place of rhetorical tools in the human sciences; and the strategies of overcoming the legitimation crisis of the human sciences. Because of its commitment to the radical universalization of the hermeneutic problem, the strong programme of hermeneutics of science, suggested in this book, avoids both objectivism and relativism. In this regard, the essays must be read in relation to the search for a middle way between defending epistemic rationality as a basis for futher development of the "project of modernity" and the postmodern deconstruction of all cognitive identities of modernity.

Alternately titled the "Assertion of Religion," "the great work," "Logosophia," magnum opus, and the Opus Maximum, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's philosophical assertion of religion was often regarded as the work that would determine his permanent contribution to the history of ideas. Despite endless preparatory studies, however, Coleridge's plan to develop a unified system, drawing from philosophy, literature, theology, history, and the natural sciences, remained incomplete at his death. Coleridge's Assertion of Religion contains the first collection of original scholarship on the newly published Opus Maximum. While the language of the Opus Maximum is often complex and fragmentary, the essays in this volume open new avenues for future discussion of pivotal themes in Coleridge's writings, including careful analysis of Coleridge's conception of God and the Trinity, the human will, his relationship to Neoplatonism, and his unique defense of the human self through the connection between a mother and a child. The volume thereby contributes to the ongoing assessment of Coleridge's contribution to nineteenth-century Romanticism and his place in the history of ideas.

John B. Thompson's collection of translated essays forms an illuminating introduction to Paul Ricoeur's prolific contributions to sociological theory.