This chapter offers an exposition of Collingwood’s theory of imagination as presented in the commonly overlooked Book Two of The Principles of Art. I show how the standard objections to Collingwood’s view are relatively superficial, and also how the account in Book Two should be understood in the light of Collingwood’s remarks concerning the imagination in his earlier writings (especially Speculum Mentis and Outlines of a Philosophy of Art). For Collingwood, sense perception inseparably involves the imagination of possible objects of perception in any perceptual experience. Moreover, the imagination makes the sensory object thinkable – a position that blends Kantian and Humean motifs. Additionally, the crucial mark of the imaginary object is self-containment (“monadism”), a notion serving to clarify both Collingwood’s claim that the imagination is indifferent to reality or unreality and the conceptual connection, on his view, between imagination and art.

In ‘The Emergence of the Concept in Early Greek philosophy’, André Laks argues that we can trace the first inklings of thinking about concepts by paying close attention to early Greek answers to the following three questions: how is perceptual information reached and processed by the mind, what is the relationship between perception and thinking, and how do the early Greek philosophers account for name-giving? First, Laks discusses whether the explanations of sensory mechanisms offered by the early Greek philosophers as well as by the medical authors might have prepared the ground for later theories of concept formation. Second, he argues that we should resist the Aristotelian report according to which the early Greek philosophers identified thinking with perceiving. In fact, we have good reasons to assume that early Greek philosophers attempted to offer an account of the process of thinking. The final section of the chapter turns to the question of the relationship between giving names to things, and forming and grasping the corresponding concept.

I reconstruct the preliminary arguments of the Transcendental Aesthetic, which provide the criteria of on which Kant’s central arguments will turn. Kant characterizes intuition as (i) object-giving, (ii) immediate, (iii) affection-dependent representation containing (iv) a matter of sensation that can be distinguished from (v) an a priori form. I explain Kant’s curiously teleological claim that all thought “aims at” intuition in terms of his “baseline conception” of intuition as providing nonintellectual grounds of truth: This is what it means for intuition to be object-giving. I then argue that Kant’s theory of discursive marks entails that object-giving representations must be immediate. Further, the intuition paired with a discursive intellect must be receptive (i.e. affection dependent). These claims can be justified via pure apperception. What cannot be is Kant’s characterization of intuition as sensible. But I show that Kant’s form/matter distinction and his subsequent arguments require only the receptivity of intuition, not its sensory embodiment. The chief doctrines of the Aesthetic can be justified via pure apperception, as part of a top-down approach to intuition.

The 1860s marked a key moment in the history of extraction and the rise of extraction-based life, a social order premised on the removal of subsurface resources and, especially, on the coal economy. This decade saw the explosion of an economic discourse around coal exhaustion in Britain, thanks to the publication of William Stanley Jevons’s The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines[GK21] (1865), and the expansion of overseas imperial extraction projects following, for example, the discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1869) in South Africa. In this chapter, I explore the role of extraction in the 1860s’ most characteristic genre: sensation fiction. After an overview of the chronotope of exhaustion and how it manifests in fiction, I turn to two sensation novels premised on extractive plots: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret [GK22](1862) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone [GK23](1868). Together they suggest the extent to which British national life was, by the 1860s, already imagined to be fully dependent on extraterritorial mineral inputs.

How can we use cognitive approaches to embed the dynamic and often variant outcomes of ritual experiences? Key themes that have emerged in both individual and communal rituals are the subjectivity and variation in these experiences: the role of physical and emotional interaction in shaping memory. The concluding chapter begins with a vivid discussion of cognition, sensation and experience, exploring how these elements function together, creating a spectrum of variable experiences and outcomes in modern and ancient ritual contexts. This section is used to further develop ideas, common themes and issues connecting the different chapters – the versatility of ritual experience(s), the role of embodied cognition in constructing ritual experience(s), the importance of the relationship between distributed cognition and ritual experience(s) - and how these themes help to expand disciplinary boundaries in the study of ancient religions and religious rituals. The concluding chapter also situates the themes of the volume within current cognitive science of religion research as well as broader disciplines such as art, heritage and museum studies. These discussions address how the study of ancient religions from a cognitive perspective can contribute to a number of disciplines, opening up new venues for research and interdisciplinary collaboration.

This chapter analyses the ways in which Byron’s sense of himself as a writer was gradually, often painfully, informed by the evolving discourse of addiction as it was being medicalised throughout the early nineteenth century and subsequently used to describe a troubling new category of behaviour. For Byron, the act of writing and the emerging sense of his own identity as a poet is formulated not simply through metaphors of addiction, which he himself helped to write into culture, but also through its physical expression. This was much more than a figure of speech – his need to write emerged in painful, bodily manifestations; Byron did not simply write about his writing habit – his habit, in part, wrote him.

Literary and filmic renditions of war are often organized around expressions of heightened sensation and aptitude. Sensation functions as a kind of other or alternative to trauma, a way of figuring the extreme experience of war in terms that, like trauma, separate the soldier from the ordinary citizen. At the same time, civilian texts by writers as diverse as H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Kurt Vonnegut have explored the way sensation and other forms of exaltation, including the sublime, might also characterize the civilian experience of war. This chapter explores the close connection between the motifs of sublimity and sensation in war with other related principles that have characterized twentieth-century literature, considering both combatant and civilian texts. The chapter argues that the moral culture of the twentieth century requires that we acknowledge the shared experience of war across combat and non-combatant lines, and second, that the slippage between these two, and the rendering of exaltation as a value that can be abstracted from war, carries its own moral risks.

Augustine is rightly regarded as one of the major figures of Christianity. Through him Platonist and Neo-Platonist philosophy was appropriated in the new religious context and there is hardly another thinker of the early Christian tradition who can better illustrate Nietzsche’s remark on Christianity as a Platonism for the people than Augustine. Things are, however, more complicated than Nietzsche suggests. As Étienne Gilson has showed, there is a strong tension between medieval Aristotelianism and the necessity to respect the early foundational authority, which Saint Augustine incontestably was. Aquinas has in this sense a quite complicated relation to his predecessor. In order to understand what is at stake in Augustine’s understanding of the biblical message of love, heavily influenced by Paul, it is important not only to describe the Neoplatonist roots of Augustine’s thought, but also to take the wider ancient context into account – and in this way arrive at a more complete picture of the historical and intellectual setting. The modification Augustine brings to the Aristotelian conception of the soul is hereby particularly revealing. A closer study of the relation between desire and love can shed some light on this highly significant constellation.

“Amidst his gray philosophizing, Life breaks upon a man like a morning.” Melville, Pierre or the Ambiguities1 In the decades since Stanley Cavell’s provocation in Senses of Walden that nineteenth-century American philosophy is perhaps best found in the “metaphysical riot of its greatest literature,”2 critics have charted with renewed interest how writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Melville, Dickinson, Douglass, and Whitman have responded to and challenged the philosophical tradition. They have explored how these writers anticipate philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze, and how contemporary philosophers from Giorgio Agamben to Slavoj Žižek have used pallid Melville as a cipher for their own conceptual systems.3 At the same time, critics have articulated how nineteenth-century American writers offer unique philosophies; how their writings blur literature and philosophy, as well as science and psychology; and how they develop their own philosophies of democracy, race, and sexuality.4 For Elizabeth Duquette, recent philosophical investigations of American literature have highlighted the importance “of the practice and place of philosophy in nineteenth-century American literature” and inspired scholars to “reexamine assumptions about abstraction, and what we do when we read a literary text.”5 It is not only a question of recognizing that writers such as Dickinson or Poe, Melville or Douglass are themselves perspicuous readers of philosophy, or that they make philosophical interventions of their own. These writers also push us to rethink issues of representation, interpretation, expression, style, and form. Given the wealth of recent philosophical readings of American literature, then, one might even be tempted to consider the study of American literature and philosophy as an emergent subfield.

In an 1879 production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the esteemed British actor Henry Irving offered a new interpretation of Shylock, sparking a debate that roiled the London press.1 Instead of portraying the Jewish miser as a comic scapegoat as had been tradition, Irving lent dignity and pathos to the misunderstood figure, soliciting an unexpected sympathy from many in the audience.2 By all accounts, the scene that created the most striking effect was one of Irving’s own invention.

The discovery and implementation of telescopy and microscopy extended the power of the senses, with often surprising results. The discoveries made with these instruments challenged existing theories of nature, while simultaneously demanding new theories to account for their operation, especially of vision. Moreover, early modern epistemology had to accommodate experiential evidence made by these “artificial” means. The chapter also address advances in the literature since the twenty-year-old classic, The Invisible World by Catherine Wilson.

The fourth chapter offers an extended conclusion that examines an international controversy ignited by the guillotine that revolved around the relationship between cognition and sensation, the evidentiary authority of bodily experience, and the limitations of human perception. It argues that the works of Fuseli, Girodet, and de Loutherbourg point to the radical remapping of an Enlightenment empirical framework that used the human body as a privileged source of knowledge. The controversies that circulated around the guillotine heralded, instead, a world in which “appearance” and “truth,” “seeing” and “knowing,” were radically decoupled – a world where scientists began removing direct sensory observation from their experimental procedures and where the idealized nude body no longer stabilized pictorial meaning. It proposes that this shift had significant implications for the epistemological status of experience for Romanticism, more broadly.

Aristotle identifies perception as central to all animals, enabling them to fulfill their ends. His biological works clarify his hylomorphic account of perception as a key activity of the soul by providing detailed overviews of types of perception and perceptual organs. Like other bodily organs, these have complex structures comprised of physical components, often in layers, all ultimately involving the four basic elements. I defend a compromise position on scholarly controversies about whether Aristotle can successfully provide a physicalist account of perception. Briefly, the answer is “yes and no.” His biological works, along with “chemical” works, do give physical accounts of perceptible features like colors and tastes, as well as of the organs (and parts) capable of registering them. However, because of his teleological views about nature, such accounts must be “top-down” and are never purely reductive or translatable into structural accounts like those of the atomists. Finally, we must remember that perception is crucial to the behavioral success of the animal as a whole within its environment. Perceptual “experience” in our modern sense does not occur in any organ but rather in the body as a whole, and more centrally in the heart and blood vessels.

This chapter considers sentiment and sensation as intertwined subgenres of early nineteenth-century literature and culture. It argues that understanding how sentimental forms harness ideas about end times to advocate for change in the first half of the century requires acknowledging how both sentiment and sensation stage dramatic, tension-filled moments. After reviewing recent scholarship on intersections between sentiment and terror and the complex religiosity of nineteenth-century sentimental traditions, the chapter turns to George Lippard’s 1845 novel The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall to illustrate how relationships between fiction, visuality, and theater and performance culture function to create apocalyptic spectacle. Discourses of spectatorship in a sensational novel such as Lippard’s and in a sentimental novel such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) are central to tensions between faith and doubt in an era characterized by both reform movements and vibrant visual and performance cultures.

This chapter examines the genre of sensation fiction, which flourished alongside efforts to introduce British women’s suffrage into the Ballot Act of 1872. Sensation and suffrage were both seen as alarming, unnatural, and immoral attempts for women to gain representation. Sensation novels inspired much critical hand-wringing through their depiction of antiheroines and villainesses that supposedly imperiled the virtue and femininity of the female reader, who identified with them against her will. Modern critics tend to accept sensation’s self-advertisement according to which it elicits a reflexive, psychosomatic response from female readers. This chapter, however, asserts that Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s narrative techniques in her popular sensation novels prompt readers’ awareness of and resistance to the affinities ostensibly endorsed by the novels, soliciting the reader’s choices among multiple possible perspectives. At issue in the arguments for and against women’s enfranchisement were notions of women’s ethical integrity and susceptibility to affective influence. The chapter contends that sensation fiction fomented scandal not because it corrupted impressionable female readers with its content, but because it challenged the automatized emotionalism ascribed to women and promoted, instead, their rational and ethical autonomy – in direct opposition to the premises held by the anti-suffragists.

This chapter takes a metapoetic approach to Lucretian allusion to show that the DRN figures the phenomenon of echo as a metaphor for literary appropriation. Lucretius culminates his discussion of acoustic phenomena and hearing with the example of the echo (DRN 4.549–94). Insofar as echo is introduced as the most prominent effect in the perceptible world of the atomic reverberations that give rise to auditory aisthēsis, I argue that Lucretius' multiple allusions to earlier poetry in this passage also serve to illustrate metapoetically the process itself of hearing. The ideas inherent in this Lucretian passage find parallels in the fragmentary papyri of Philodemus.