Synopses & Reviews
Since the early 1990s, there has been a resurgence of interest in philosophy between Kant and Hegel, and in early German romanticism in particular. Philosophers have come to recognize that, in spite of significant differences between the contemporary and romantic contexts, romanticism continues to persist, and the questions which the romantics raised remain relevant today.
The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on Early German Romantic Philosophy is the first collection of essays that offers an in-depth analysis of the reasons why philosophers are (and should be) concerned with romanticism. Through historical and systematic reconstructions, the collection offers a deeper understanding and more encompassing picture of romanticism as a philosophical movement than has been presented thus far, and explicates the role that romanticism plays -- or can play -- in contemporary philosophical debates.
The volume includes essays by a number of preeminent international scholars and philosophers -- Karl Ameriks, Frederick Beiser, Richard Eldridge, Michael Forster, Manfred Frank, Jane Kneller, and Paul Redding -- who discuss the nature of philosophical romanticism and its potential to address contemporary questions and concerns. Through contributions from established and emerging philosophers, discussing key romantic themes and concerns, the volume highlights the diversity both within romantic thought and its contemporary reception. Part One consists of the first published encounter between Manfred Frank and Frederick Beiser, in which the two major scholars directly discuss their vastly differing interpretations of philosophical romanticism. Part Two draws significant connections between romantic conceptions of history, sociability, hermeneutics and education and explores the ways in which these views can illuminate pressing questions in contemporary social-political philosophy and theories of interpretation. Part Three consists in some of the most innovative takes on romantic aesthetics, which seek to bring romantic thought into dialogue, with, for instance, contemporary Analytic aesthetics and theories of cognition/mind. The final part offers one of the few rigorous engagements with romantic conceptions science, and demonstrates ways in which the romantic views of nature, scientific experimentation and mathematics need not be relegated to historical curiosities.
About the Author
Dalia Nassar is a research fellow of the Australian Research Council (ARC) in the philosophy department at the University of Sydney and assistant professor of philosophy at Villanova University. She is the author of
The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy 1795-1804 (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Contributors
Introduction
PART ONE German Romanticism as a Philosophical Movement
1. What is Early German Romantic Philosophy?
Manfred Frank
2. Romanticism and Idealism
Frederick Beiser
PART TWO History, Hermeneutics and Sociability
3. History, Succession, and German Romanticism
Karl Ameriks
4. Romanticism and Language
Michael N. Forster
5. Hermeneutics, Individuality, and Tradition: Schleiermacher's Idea of Bildung in the Landscape of Hegelian Thought
Kristin Gjesdal
6. Sociability and the Conduct of Philosophy: What We Can Learn from Early German Romanticism
Jane Kneller
PART THREE Literature, Art and Mythology
7. "Doch sehnend stehst /Am Ufer du" ("But Longing You Stand On the Shore"): Hölderlin, Philosophy, Subjectivity, and Finitude
Richard Eldridge
8. On the Defense of Literary Value: From Early German Romanticism to Analytic Philosophy of Literature
Brady Bowman
9. "No Poetry, No Reality": Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Fiction and Reality
Keren Gorodeisky
10. The Simplicity of the Sublime: A New Picturing of Nature in Caspar David Friedrich
Laure Cahen-Maurel
11. The New Mythology: Romanticism between Religion and Humanism
Bruce Matthews
PART FOUR Science and Nature
12. Mathematics, Computation, Language and Poetry: The Novalis Paradox
Paul Redding
13. Friedrich Schlegel's Romantic Calculus: Reflections on the Mathematical Infinite around 1800
John H. Smith
14. The "Mathematical" Wissenschaftslehre: On a Late Fichtean Reflection of Novalis
David W. Wood
15. Irritable Figures: Herder's Poetic Empiricism
Amanda Jo Goldstein
16. Romantic Empiricism after the "End of Nature": Contributions to Environmental Philosophy
Dalia Nassar
Works Cited
Index