For Keats, the question of whether it is enough to receive this world on its own terms. For Stevens, as we will see, the most realized commitment of what it means for a person to do just that. Both evolve from a notion of the poet as actively receiving the world, and thereby, in so actively receiving it, actively apprehending its shape. That notion of … Continue reading 198. (Robert Browning)
One story of Romanticism (mostly true, however simplified) goes: some poets from 1790s onwards find their freedom in their capacity to imagine the world. It reflects a distortion and exaggeration of idealist philosophy: freedom arrives as man imposes his understanding onto reality. The better, defensible, fruitful story about German idealism goes: in self-conscious actions and beliefs about the world, humanity finds its freedom. (That is … Continue reading 195. (Alfred Lord Tennyson)
Close kin in to his near-simultaneous monograph Self-Consciousness, Sebastian Rödl’s Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect (publ. in German, 2005; in English, translated by Sybille Salewski, 2012) is a book that, despite its daunting title, non-Philosophers would enjoy. The reach of its ambitions, its elegance and efficiency of argument, and the sense of style born of necessity and urgency rather than self-awareness or … Continue reading 190. (Sebastian Rödl)
My limited experience reading contemporary philosophers has convinced me that Wittgenstein, Kant, and Aristotle need to be read alongside one another, and that a tangle or confusion in one of the three is often worked out by the strength of a concept or line of argument in another; that view has itself been shaped and strengthened by the concurrent realization that the contemporary interlocutors and … Continue reading 156. (Hannah Ginsborg)
Sebastian Rödl is a philosopher, not a poet, novelist, dramatist, or essayist. His appearance on this blog is an anomaly, prompted by the excitement and pleasure I took, as a non-philosopher, in reading his book, Self-Consciousness. I’m not qualified to assess his argument philosophically, but others have done so, and even as a non-philosopher, I can appreciate the movement, scope, and subtlety of his arguments. The … Continue reading 128. (Sebastian Rödl)
