Abstracts
Abstract
One of the common mysteries of art, and a barrier to our understanding of Coleridge's claim that natural form lies at the heart of knowledge, is the problem of how it is that art can embody meaning in its sensuous forms—for instance, in visual, tactile or auditory "images." To our common way of thinking, this seems mysterious, for we usually think of thinking as something which is propositional and linguistic, or (though less popular these days) as being in some sense "pure" and above both the senses and language. But while propositional thinking is certainly a dimension of our mental experience, we should not let it blind us to the more fundamental ways in which we perceive and understand the world through the senses. Thus we should not think of syllogistic argument as the paradigm for thought, as the Anglo-American philosophical world has tended to, nor should we think of thought as paradigmatically linguistic in the way the literary theory of the last thirty years has suggested. Rather, we should find that paradigm in those moments when we are looking at the world (looking out of the window at a tree, for instance). Concrete sensuous form, or image, I shall argue, provides a more fundamental paradigm for thought—a paradigm which art brings to the fore, and which is also fundamentally Coleridgean.
Appendices
Works Cited
- Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.
- Aurell, Carl G. "Perception: A Model Comprising Two Modes of Consciousness." Perceptual and Motor Skills 56: 211-220.
- Ayer, A.J. Part of My Life. London: Collins, 1977.
- Barzun, Jacques. Berlioz and the Romantic Century. New York: Columbia UP, 1969.
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957.
- ———. Opus Maximum. Ed. Thomas McFarland and Nicholas Halmi. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002.
- ———. The Statesman's Manual, reprinted in Lay Sermons. Ed. R.J. White. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.
- Collingwood, R.G. "Review." Philosophy 8 (1932): 335-337.
- Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam, 1994.
- Currie, Gregory. Frege: An Introduction to his Philosophy. Totowa NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982.
- Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little Brown, 1991.
- Engell, James. The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard UP, 1981.
- Ellis, Ralph D. Questioning Consciousness: The Interplay of Imagery, Cognition, and Emotion in the Human Brain. Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1995.
- Everhart, D. Erik, Janet L. Shucard, Teresa Quatrin, and David W. Shucard. "Sex-Related Differences in Event-Related Potentials, Face Recognition, and Facial Affect Processing in Prepubertal Children." Neuropsychology 15.3: 329-341.
- Fodor, Jerry A. The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and its Semantics. Cambridge Mass.: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1995.
- Frege, Gottlob. The Frege Reader. Ed. Michael Beaney. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
- Galloway, David. "Wynn on Mathematical Empiricism." Mind and Language 7.4 (1992): 333-358.
- Goldman, Alvin. "In Defense of Simulation Theory." Mind and Language 7.1 (1992): 104-119.
- Gordon, Robert M. "The Simulation Theory: Objections and Misconceptions." Mind and Language 7.1 (1992): 11-34.
- Greenberg, Mark. "What Connects Thought and Action?" Times Literary Supplement (June 23 1995): 8.
- Haack, Susan. Evidence and Inquiry. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
- Hodson, John A. "Transcendental Tropes: Coleridge's Rhetoric of Allegory and Symbol." Allegory, Myth and Symbol. Ed. Morton W. Bloomfield. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard UP, 1981. 273-292.
- Johnson-Laird, Philip N. Human and Machine Thinking. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1993.
- Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1980.
- Keats, John. "Ode on a Grecian Urn," The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Ed. A.W. Allison et al. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1983.
- Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
- Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a New Key. London: OUP, 1951.
- Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. John W. Yolton. Abr. ed. London: Dent, 1977.
- Lucas, J.R. "Minds, Machines and Gödel." Philosophy 36 (1961): 120-124.
- Metzinger, Thomas. "Teaching Philosophy with Argumentation Maps: Review Of Can Computers Think? The Debate, Robert E. Horn." Psyche 5.30 (October 1999) <http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v5/psyche-5-30-metzinger.html>.
- Penrose, Roger. Shadows of the Mind. London: Vintage, 1995; first published 1994.
- Perkins, Mary Anne. Coleridge's Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.
- Pinker, Stephen. The Language Instinct. London: Penguin, 1994.
- Prickett, Stephen. Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970.
- Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.
- Reid, L.A. A Study in Aesthetics. London: Allen and Unwin, 1931.
- ———. Knowledge and Truth. London: Macmillan, 1923.
- ———.Ways of Understanding and Education. London: Heinemann, 1986.
- Reid, Nicholas. "Form in Coleridge; and in Perception and Art more generally", Romanticism On the Net, No. 26 (May 2002) http:www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2002/v/n26/005699ar.html.
- Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949.
- Searle, John R. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard UP, c1992.
- Shelley, P.B. "A Defence of Poetry." Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Ed. D.H. Reiman and S.B. Powers. New York: Norton, 1977.
- Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983/1985.
- Trilling, Lionel. "Art and the Philosopher." Griffin 3.8 (August 1954): 5-13.
- Warnock, Mary. Imagination. London: Faber, 1976.
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.