Testimony of Sense - Empiricism and the Essay From Hume to Hazlitt

This book offers a new account of the relationship between empiricism and the essay in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Exploring topics such as trust, testimony, virtue, and language, it offers new perspectives on connections between philosophy and literature, empiricism and transcendentalism, and Enlightenment and Romanticism.

List of contents

• Preface


• Introduction. Empiricism Made Easy


• 1: Self and Intersubjectivity


• 2: The Subject of Trust


• 3: The Conversable Intellect


• 4: Essays in Experience


• 5: Romantic Empiricism


• Conclusion


• Bibliography

About the author

Tim Milnes is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He previously held posts at University College, Oxford, and Christ Church University College, Canterbury. He has published widely on Romanticism and philosophy, and is the author of The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (CUP, 2010), Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (CUP, 2003), and William Wordsworth: The Prelude (Palgrave, 2009). His is also the co-editor of Romanticism, Sincerity, and Authenticity (Palgrave, 2010).

Summary

This book offers a new account of the relationship between empiricism and the essay in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Exploring topics such as trust, testimony, virtue, and language, it offers new perspectives on connections between philosophy and literature, empiricism and transcendentalism, and Enlightenment and Romanticism.

Additional text

Milnes's book is a finely discriminating and persuasive contribution to the scholarly debate on philosophies of intersubjectivity and disinterestedness, candid conversational style amid social conventions, and ethics that lies at the very heart of Hazlitt's incomparable achievements as an essayist.

Product details

• Authors: Tim Milnes, Tim (University of Edinburgh) Milnes, Milnes Tim
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.06.2019
• EAN: 9780198812739
• ISBN: 978-0-19-881273-9
• No. of pages: 290
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Philosophy: antiquity to present day; PHILOSOPHY / History & Surveys / General, PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Pragmatism, PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Humanism, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 18th Century, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800, Western philosophy: Enlightenment