This paper is concerned with Coleridge's view of science as at once a branch of knowledge and a creative activity, mediating between man and nature, and thereby complementing poetry. Coleridge was well-informed about contemporary science. He stressed the symbolic status of scientific language, the role of scientific genius, and the need in science to rely upon reason rather than the unqualified senses. Kepler and, more recently, John Hunter and Humphry Davy provided his favorite instances of scientific genius, while chemistry—Davy's not (...) Lavoisier's—was poetic. Science and poetry could both rely on reason, the power of language, and faithfulness to nature. (shrink)

(1996). Samuel Taylor Coleridge on nature and reason: With a response from William Whewell. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Science and Religion in Modern Western Thought, pp. 1683-1693.

In this paper I propose to examine a mythical character that has a tremendous influence on the debate over the new Israeli-Jewish identity. The paper argues that the Wandering/Eternal Jew, aside from its intrinsic importance for Jewish History, functions as a mechanism through which the opposition with the Sabra is maintained in Israeli society. Present time history textbooks try to capture only those aspects of Israeli history relevant for modern contemporary society and culture, for the great majority of scholars the (...) myth of the Eternal Jew being a grotesque falsification. Despite this though, the character of the Eternal relates to different aspects of the identity- problems raised by the opposition Jewish versus Israeli and can be absolutely relevant in this sense. (shrink)

Most studies deny that Kritik der Urteilskraft played a significant role in the early reception of Kant’s philosophy in England. In this paper, I examine the notebooks, letters and lectures of several members of British medical and scientific institutions to tell a different story. Drawing from the writings of Thomas Beddoes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Henry Green and William Whewell, I identify a line of reception in which Kant’s critique of judgement’s power of reflection was used to establish the consilience (...) of the mind’s anticipation of systematic order and the organization of natural bodies. Each discovered in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft a shared principle for judgements of taste and scientific inquiry, made available through the mind’s affective response to the appearance of contingent order in nature. Their writings, I contend, evince a more sophisticated reception of Kant’s philosophy in England than has hitherto been recognized. (shrink)

Brayton Polka’s On Poetry and Philosophy: Thinking Metaphorically with Wordsworth and Kant is a capstone book, the fruit of more than half a century of thinking, teaching, and writing about the cen...

This essay examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Logic and its interpretation of Kant's “science of transcendental analysis” as a theory of the cognitive faculties and their “inherent forms” or “several functional powers”. I explain why Coleridge characterises transcendental analysis as an “investigation into the constitution and constituent forms” of the faculties, and consider the reasons behind his schematic division of such inquiry into “transcendental [ … ] Æsthetic, Logic, and Noetic”. I argue that Coleridge's claims about the forms, operations, and contents (...) that derive from different cognitive powers, and the philosophical method that enables us to prove such derivation, are based on Kant's theory of “transcendental reflection”. I also explain how Coleridge's facultative conception of transcendental analysis relates to recent scholarship on Kant's accounts of (i) our cognitive capacities and (ii) the purposes of transcendental reflection. My essay does not aim to defend Coleridge's interpretation of Kant, but rather to provide a clearer picture of how this interpretation informs Coleridge's analysis of cognitive activity and mental content in Logic, including his “transcendental noetic”, which seeks to explain the possibility of the kind intellectual intuition that Kant explicitly denies. (shrink)

This paper considers how Schelling’s earlier work functions as a fifth column for the Germano-Coleridgeans, particularly Coleridge himself and Green. I consider their engagement with Schelling’s First Outline in relation to the Hunterian collection bought by the Crown in 1799, which made the life sciences a public concern within the framework of how knowledge was to be organized. The paper explores the pressure the life sciences put on philosophy and the constraining of both, in the context of British Idealism, by (...) religious imperatives that are internal, conceptual censors, and external (cultural and institutional) censors. Consolidating his work between the Romantic and Victorian periods, Green is a neglected figure in a progress from natural to political theology that coincides with a shift in British idealism from Schelling to a sanitized Hegel. Coleridge’s dialogue with and often expedient misrepresentations of Schelling are more complex, as he uses Schelling’s “Stufenfolge” to argue for a design in nature, yet is constantly troubled by a biodiversity and difference in nature to which Schelling was more open. Initially deploying Schelling to reconcile transcendental and natural philosophy, Coleridge can never entirely escape the trouble that biology causes philosophy and that philosophy (through Schelling) causes religion. (shrink)