Knoledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose [Paperback]

This 2003 study sheds light on the way in which the English Romantics dealt with the problems of knowledge.This ambitious study sheds new light on the way in which the English Romantics dealt with the basic problems of knowledge. Kant complained that the failure of philosophy in the eighteenth-century to answer empirical scepticism had produced a culture of 'indifferentism'. Tim Milnes explores the tension between this epistemic indifference and a perpetual compulsion to know. This tension is most clearly evident in the prose writing of the period, in works such as Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action, and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.This ambitious study sheds new light on the way in which the English Romantics dealt with the basic problems of knowledge. Kant complained that the failure of philosophy in the eighteenth-century to answer empirical scepticism had produced a culture of 'indifferentism'. Tim Milnes explores the tension between this epistemic indifference and a perpetual compulsion to know. This tension is most clearly evident in the prose writing of the period, in works such as Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action, and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.This ambitious study sheds new light on the way the English Romantics dealt with the basic problems of knowledge. Kant complained that the failure of philosophy in the eighteenth-century to respond to empirical scepticism had produced a culture of indifferentism. Tim Milnes explores the tension between this epistemic indifference and a perpetual compulsion to know. The tension is most clearly evident in the prose writing of the period, in works such as Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action, and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.Acknowledgments; Introduction; Romanticism's knowing ways; 1. From artistic to epistemic creation: the eighteenth celC