Nineteenth-century studies has – like other fields – sought to move beyond the notion of progressive secularization in which religious beliefs disappear in modernity. But what will replace this paradigm? A compelling alternative emerges when we attend to how the Romantics and Victorians resist what Charles Taylor calls “excarnation” – the modern construal of religion primarily as inward belief unhooked from material reality and ritual forms. The Romantics’ and Victorians’ liturgical fascinations signal a suspicion of excarnation and an attempt to re-poeticize religion. The full significance of this use of liturgy, however, only appears in light of a much deeper genealogy of modernity stretching back to the late-medieval rise of voluntarism and nominalism. Such a genealogy reveals the theological origins of so many modern bifurcations (natural/supernatural, reason/faith, etc.) – bifurcations that nineteenth-century texts challenge and rethink by way of liturgy. Examples from Keats, Hopkins, Carlyle, Arnold, Dickens, and others forecast the book’s main arguments.

Chapter two is dedicated to the complicated contemporary debate on the notion of biological species. After a short introduction and critical analysis of all major relational and intrinsic definitions of species, special attention is paid to the recent revival of the essentialist species concept, both in its contemporary and classical Aristotelian-Thomistic formulations, tested against the two major arguments denying their compatibility with evolutionary biology.

Chapter 7 evaluates the force of a first argument in favor of the Innateness Hypothesis: the argument from universals. We will distinguish various types of universals, and examples will be provided. We will first look back at the organization of the mental grammar and ask which parts of that system could be innate. It is then made clear that we need to critically examine when alleged universals can be safely used to support the Innateness Hypothesis. We learn that the argument from universals has to be applied with care and without falling into logical fallacies. We need to realize that alleged universal properties of languages may, firstly, be applicable more generally to cognitive systems that include language (in which case they are not language-domain specific) and, secondly, be caused by factors that have nothing to do with the proposed innate Universal Grammar that nativists postulate. To use a universal in support of the Innateness Hypothesis, it needs to be specific to language and not be explainable in terms of other factors. We also see how Chomsky’s ideas about what might be innate for language have changed over time.

This chapter offers a brief survey of general and narrow senses of “nominalism” in historical writing. It argues that nominalism should be strictly understood as a subcategory within the larger context of a style of argument best characterized as “terminism,” an approach that dominated the Liberal Arts in late medieval schools. It explains why terminism was more inclusive of a variety of doctrines than nominalism in its proper sense. It concludes by considering early reactions to Ockham.

The thought of Ockham represents a watershed in medieval theology. Ockham is often seen as the father of nominalism, and his epistemology, views on faith and reason, theology and philosophy, are duly examined.

This chapter situates both the nominalist and neo-Carnapian approaches to mathematics introduced in Chapter 10 with particular reference to Logicism and Structuralism.

This chapter notes how the potentialist set theory advocated in previous chapters can be naturally extended to a larger philosophy of mathematics, either in a nominalist or a neo-carnapian fashion.

This chapter suggests classic indispensability worries about nominalizing scientific theories can be answered by adding some cheap tricks to the modal if-thenist paraphrase strategy of Chapter 12.

This chapter argues that paraphrases produced by the basic modal if-thenist paraphrase strategy of Chapter 12 can attractively answer Explanatory Indispensability Arguments.

With the fourth chapter, the focus pivots from the introductory investigation of the major Buddhist and mystic concepts Beckett secreted into his early fictions to engage with the paradoxical, aporetic (insoluable), and apophatic (negative) procedures of his early and subsequent writing and their disorienting effects on audiences. The chapter begins with examining Beckett’s involvement with what he himself qualified as the Buddha’s folle sagesse (mad wisdom) (Disjecta 146). Further, interrogating Mādhyamika philosopher Nāgārjuna’s paradoxical logic serves to examine Beckett’s similar challenges to the principles of noncontradiction. Introducing the Mādhyamika view of language as a veil that prevents experiencing śūnyatā, or emptiness, the chapter’s second section reexamines Beckett’s proposed ‘literature of the unword’ and the controversy raging about the role of Fritz Mauthner’s Indian-tinged nominalist critique in this view. Beckett’s commonalities with the French literature of silence of the 1940s and an exploration of Beckett’s paradoxical ethics of emptiness bring this chapter to an end.

This chapter studies Lorenzo Valla’s critique of the language and thought of the scholastics. Valla contrasts classical Latin, as a natural, common language, with the so-called artificial, technical, and unnatural language of his opponents. He famously champions Quintilian’s view that one should follow common linguistic usage. Scholars, however, have disagreed about the precise interpretation of these qualifications of Latin. This chapter argues that, depending on the historical, rhetorical, and argumentative contexts, Valla uses notions such as common and natural in different ways to suit different purposes. After an examination of Valla’s notion of common linguistic usage, which is shown to refer mainly (though not always) to classical Latin, the chapter analyzes Valla’s Dialectical Disputations, which attacks metaphysical and logical concepts from Aristotelian philosophy. It is shown that Valla combines two levels of criticism: scholastic Latin is ungrammatical and it is unnatural. To make both points Valla moves between a strictly Latinate point of view, and a sociological perspective according to which use of language should follow the rules and conventions of the community. The chapter argues that this leads to a tension in Valla’s humanist project concerning Latin as a common language and the notion of the common people.

Most literary histories of Renaissance skepticism neglect medieval skepticism and address a single genre, usually drama, or a single author, usually Montaigne or Shakespeare. This literary history of skepticism in England addresses medieval skepticism as well as multiple genres and authors. The introduction defines key terms, distinguishes between first- and second-wave skepticism (using William Walwyn and Joseph Glanvill as examples), and clarifies the relation of skepticism to secularization. It reviews competing narratives of secularization in early modernity, including those of Hans Blumenberg, C. John Sommerville, and Charles Taylor. It argues that the challenges posedby philosophical skepticism incite aesthetic innovation. Issues of cognition, language, ethics, and politics are identified. These include problems of doubt and suspended judgment, the uncertainty of private experience, illusions of impartiality, dilemmas of neutrality, parodies of sovereignty, questions of religious conflict, dissent and toleration, as well the pleasures of aisthesis and the skeptical sublime.

The afterword considers the crisis of experience in Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Samson’s uncertainties about God’s plans and his difficulties interpreting his own heart capture the plight of the godly individual in a world with a hidden God (a deus absconditus). His desire for freedom and his will to instigate political action in the absence of divine guidance capture the modern condition inaugurated by the nominalist sense of God’s distance and inscrutable power. Baffled by his own inner promptings and unable to tolerate this opacity, Samson feels compelled to experiment and hazard his strength against his enemies. Samson’s skeptical doubt results in revenge and apocalyptic violence. The sublime ending – its atmosphere of dread and horror subdued by twisting rhetorical summations – captures the dialectic of skepticism and the sublime. The illegibility of private experience – with its explosive possibilities – provides a fitting conclusion to a book about skeptical doubt in early modern English literature.

Spenser’s poetry offers a glimpse into the aesthetics of skepticism. To understand Spenser’s exploration of perception, interpretation, and subjective experience, the chapter considers skeptical questions posed by medieval philosophy regarding universals, abstraction, mental language, the status of pictures in the mind, and the extent of God’s power. According to Heiko Oberman’s view of the via moderna, these nominalist investigations with their counterfactual approach lead to feelings of contingency and autonomy that in turn produce the subversive political idea that things can be otherwise. In his translations of du Bellay and Marot in his Complaints and in “November,” as well as on Mount Acidale in The Fairy Queen and in The Mutability Cantos, Spenser creates rapturous visions that soon dissolve. These intimations of the sublime have a skeptical quality that suggest a grounding in nominalism. Because Heidegger combats a skeptical metaphysics premised on the rift between subject and object, this chapter uses aspects of his philosophical lexicon to illuminate the stakes of Spenser’s poetic travail with problems of truth, concealment, disclosure, and fullness of being.

The principal difference between Rorty’s pragmatism and that of Peirce, James, and Dewey is his commitment to the nominalism that Peirce identified as the Achilles’ heel of modern philosophy. In their different ways, Peirce, James, and Dewey sought to eliminate nominalism from empiricism. That is their shared “radical empiricism.” Rorty, by contrast, was deeply impressed by the nominalism, and especially the anti-empiricism, of Analytic philosophy, especially in Sellars, Quine, Davidson, and Brandom. The result of Rorty’s effort to undo the trenchant antinominalism of the classical pragmatists is a pragmatism without much pragmatism, but a strong linguistic relativism, an ironic pragmatism more ironic than pragmatic.