Overview

This book investigates intersections between the philosophy of nature and Hellenism in British and German Romanticism, focusing primarily on five central literary/philosophical figures: Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Hölderlin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. Near the end of the eighteenth century, poets and thinkers reinvented Greece as a site of aesthetic and ontological wholeness, a move that corresponded with a refiguring of nature as a dynamically interconnected web in which each part is linked to the living whole. This vision of a vibrant materiality that allows us to become “one with all that lives,” along with a Romantic version of Hellenism that wished to reassemble the broken fragments of an imaginary Greece as both site and symbol of this all-unity, functioned as a two-pronged response to subjective anxiety that arose in the wake of Kant and Fichte. The result is a form of resistance to an idealism that appeared to leave little roomfor a world of beauty, love, and nature beyond the self.

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9783319912912

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Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature nonetheless provides interesting analyses that help reassess these divergent paths. The possibility of such a reassessment is found in the structure of Davis's book, which is framed by an interesting idea that illuminates both post post-Kantian philosophy and logical empiricism. (Adam Tamas Tuboly, Comparative and Continental Philosophy, April 01, 2019)

Author Information

William S. Davis is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and German at Colorado College, USA.

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