As a student at the University of Jena at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867) became the outstanding English mediator of the revolution in German thought. For the first time, this volume collects his early writings, both published and unpublished. The contents include 'Letters on the Philosophy of Kant' and notes from F.W.J. Schelling's lectures on the philosophy of art. Further, Robinson's private lectures for Madame de Staël are presented with her marginalia. In the intellectual history of Romanticism, Robinson emerges as a major figure whose lucid and entertaining essays can still guide the modern reader through the key German texts.

The first volume on Schelling in English exploring the study of the history of philosophy and core systematic philosophical issues.

This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition — Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno — attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. Ayon Maharaj argues that the aesthetic speculations of these thinkers provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of "aesthetic agency"— art's capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality. Blending careful philosophical analysis with an intellectual historian's attention to the broader cultural resonance of philosophical arguments, Maharaj has two interrelated aims. He provides challenging new interpretations of the aesthetic philosophies of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno by focusing on aspects of their thought that have been neglected or misunderstood in Anglo-American and German scholarship. He demonstrates that their subtle investigations into the nature and scope of aesthetic agency have far-reaching implications for contemporary discourse on the arts. The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency is an important and original contribution to scholarship on the German aesthetic tradition and to the broader field of aesthetics.

"That a symbolic object or work of art participates in what it signifies, as a part within a whole, was a controversial claim discussed with particular intensity in the wake of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment. It informed the aesthetic theories of a constellation of writers in Jena and Weimar around 1800, including Moritz, Goethe, Schelling and Hegel. Yet the twin concepts of symbol and intuition were not only tools of literary and mythological criticism: they were integral even to questions of epistemology and methodology in the fields of theology, metaphysics, history and natural philosophy. The international contributors to this volume further explore how both the explanatory potential and peculiar dissatisfactions of the symbol entered the Anglo-American discourse, focusing on Coleridge, Crabb Robinson and Emerson. Contemporary debates about the claims of symbolic as opposed to allegorical art are kept in view throughout."

This book traces a complex of issues surrounding moral agency from Kant through Schelling to Kierkegaard.

Publisher Description

Amorous Aesthetics traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a Romantic tradition in the work of six major poets.