Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are 'stored' only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about (...) control of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. Sutton demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Descartes and Locke to Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on 'the phantasmal chaos of association'. Going on to defend connectionism against Fodor and critics of passive mental representations, he shows how problems of the self are implicated in cognitive science. (shrink)

COLERIDGE AS PHILOSOPHER by JOHN H. MUIRHEAD M. A., GLASGOW AND OXFORD LL. D., GLASGOW AND CALIFORNIA EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF..

Even if [Bentham and Coleridge] had had no great influence they would still have been the classical examples they are of two great opposing types of mind. . . . And as we follow Mill's analysis, exposition and evaluation of this pair of opposites we are at the same time, we realize, forming a close acquaintance with a mind different from either. From the introduction.

Each chapter heading bears a phrase from a contemporary author, held to incorporate the character of that section of the study under consideration. Chapter 1 carries the title given to early English translations of the Lettres provinciales; chapter 2 recalls the description of Pascall by Boyle and other English scientists; and chapter 3 draws from Kennett's preface to his version of the Pensees. The heading of chapter 4 is from Pope's Essay on Man. The exclamation which introduces chapter 5 concludes (...) an essay in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1789, probably by Boswell; the words for chapter 6 come from a pastoral letter of John Wesley; and chapter 7 represents the verdict of Coleridge. The title of the book itself is derived from the heading to the twenty-first chapter of Kennett's Pensees, which seems to have forecast the essence of the eighteenth-century's perplexity upon the issues raised by Pascal: 'The strange Contrarieties discoverable in Human Nature, with regard to Truth, and Happiness, and many other things.'. (shrink)

Bentham.--Coleridge.--M. de Tocqueville on democracy in America.--On liberty.--Utilitarianism.--From Considerations on representative government.--From An examination of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy, volume 1.--From Three essays on religion.--John Stuart Mill, a select bibliography (p. [525]-530).

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

For $\Bbb {F}$ the field of real or complex numbers, let $CG(\Bbb {F})$ be the continuous geometry constructed by von Neumann as a limit of finite dimensional projective geometries over $\Bbb {F}$ . Our purpose here is to show the equational theory of $CG(\Bbb {F})$ is decidable.

Thoughts on poetry and its vbarieties.--Bentham.--Coleridge.--On liberty.--Utilitarianism.--Inaugural address at Saint Andrews.

From the end of the Enlightenment to the middle of the twentieth century philosophy took fascinating and controversial paths whose relevance to contemporary post-modernist thought is becoming increasingly clear. This volume traces the English-language side of the period, while also taking into account those continental thinkers who deeply influenced twentieth-century English-language philosophy. The story begins with Reid, Coleridge, and Bentham - who set the agenda for much that followed - and continues with a portrait of the nineteenth century's greatest (...) British philosopher, John Stuart Mill. It then surveys the cross-currents of thought at the end of the century, including American pragmatism, a movement never more influential than now. Finally, it assesses two phases of what John Skorupski calls `analytic modernism' - the revolution against the idealism of Moore and Russell, and the Viennese sequel whose project was to show that philosophy consists of pseudo-problems. (shrink)

From the end of the Enlightenment to the middle of the twentieth century philosophy took fascinating and controversial paths whose relevance to contemporary post-modernist thought is becoming ever clearer. This volume traces the English-language side of the period, while also taking into account those continental thinkers who deeply influenced twentieth-century, English-language philosophy. The story begins with Reid, Coleridge, and Bentham--who set the agenda for much that followed--and continues with a portrait of the nineteenth century's greatest British philosopher, John (...) Stuart Mill. It then surveys the cross-currents of thought at the end of the century, including American pragmatism, a movement never more influential than now. Finally it assesses two phases of what Skorupski calls "analytic modernism"--the revolution against idealism of Moore and Russell, and the Viennese sequel whose project was to show that philosophy consists of pseudo-problems. (shrink)

Originally published in 1931, Muirhead’s study aims to challenge the view that Locke’s empiricism is the main philosophical thought to come out of England, suggesting that the Platonic tradition is much more prominent. These views are explored in detail in this text as well as touching on its development in the nineteenth century from Coleridge to Bradley and discussions on Transcendentalism in the United States. This title will be of interest to students of Philosophy.

Philosophy and Memory Traces, the book to which this is the preface, defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are ‘stored’ only superpositionally, and are reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. (...) Both raise urgent issues about control of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. The book’s historical argument is anchored by a reinterpretation of Descartes’ dynamic physiology of memory and strange philosophy of the body. English critics of Descartes’ view of memories as motions complained that mechanistic neurophilosophy could not guarantee order in memory, and instead sought techniques for controlling the brain. In a new account of 18th-century philosophers’ fears of confusion in remembering, the author demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Locke to Reid and Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on ‘the phantasmal chaos of association’. Finally, in a defence of connectionism against Jerry Fodor and against phenomenological and Wittgensteinian critics of passive mental representations, the author shows how problems of the self are implicated in contemporary sciences of mind. The book is an experiment in historical cognitive science, based on a belief that the interdisciplinary study of memory can exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and culture towards which psychological sciences must aim. (shrink)

English critics were brilliant initiators and exploiters of biblical criticism. This momentous exercise, whereby the 'Holy Scriptures' became the object of human critique independent of church control, is illustrated by John Drury in the present volume with excerpts from such famous critics as Coleridge, Blake and Matthew Arnold, and lesser names such as Collins and Deist and Bishop Sherlock. Robert Lowth's famous lectures on the Psalms, which had an important influence on Blake and Christopher Smart, are well represented (...) here, as is the famous contribution to Essays and Reviews by Benjamin Jowett. This book provides the only available collection of biblical criticism from this important period of critical enquiry, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The extracts are accompanied by a full editorial introduction, notes and a bibliography. They should be read by all students of literature and theology interested in the period. (shrink)

THE PRINCIPLE OF IDEALIST ETHICS Coleridge's well-known saying that every man is born either an Aristotelian or a Platonist, though not true in the sense ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Romanticism and Coleridge’s Idea of HistoryMichael John Kooy*Romantic historiography is widely understood in methodological terms as a subjectively determined treatment of the human past, according to which historical knowledge is grounded in imaginative activity. That ambition was amply fulfilled in Scott’s historical novels, as Georg Lukacs once demonstrated. 1 Writing in broader terms, Hayden White characterized that whole creative enterprise as an “effort at palingenesis,” the striving (...) to recreate or relive the past in individual consciousness. 2In more recent years, as the approach to the period has become more historicist, criticism has begun to separate the historical and the aesthetic aspects of this romantic sensibility, usually emphasizing one at the expense of the other. The result has been a standoff in critical thinking about the way Romanticism represents the past. One side is occupied by some new historicists who claim to find a precedent for their own methodology among prominent figures of the period. Heyne, Wordsworth, and Keats, it turns out, not only were engaged actively in their own contemporary history, but they also demonstrated in their sophisticated evocation of the past the impossibility of overcoming historical difference by reference to natural law. 3 Arguments advanced on the other side of the controversy insist that the Romantics were not nearly such good historicists as supposed. In these accounts, often allied to post-structuralism, the aesthetic absolutism implicit in the high romantic argument is undiminished by the burgeoning historical consciousness in the period. Indeed, Romanticism’s aesthetic [End Page 717] retrieval of the past appears to be an instance of how subjectivity, rather than admit its own historicity, again asserts mastery over the object through its own self-will. 4Each of these accounts commands a considerable following, and a peace between them seems unlikely, indeed undesirable. On one matter they do agree, though, and that is in their distrust of Coleridge. His historiography—the notion that ideas make history and that the way to get at these ideas is aesthetically—is too idealist for today’s historicists and too monumentally subjective for the post-structuralists. I think both judgments are hasty. Coleridge, more than most contemporaries, reflected for many years upon the difficulties that arose in his own attempts to interpret historical knowledge (which appeared as a subjective, aesthetic construct) in systematic terms (as the reflection of natural order); and a good look at the record will show that his thought is not quite so anti-historical as some believe, and his subjective approach not nearly so absolutist.The goal of this essay is to rehabilitate Coleridge’s idea of history, considering what it tells us about Romanticism and how it foreshadows current debates about methodology. 5 More specifically, I want to show how in different contexts Coleridge treats, with varying degrees of success, history as an ideational field that is both created and then interpreted by an inquiring subject. First, at the literary and cultural level, history is conceived as the object of imaginative reconstruction, where subjectivity provisionally orders the mass of material according to an idea found nowhere within history itself. Here the anti-positivist bias of Coleridge’s idealist historiography dominates a project that is, both in orientation and achievement, not so much cognitive as aesthetic. Secondly, at the level of religion, history is conceived in mythic terms, the past being revealed only symbolically to the discerning inquirer who must interpret the Christian mythos as recorded in the inspired biblical account of the nation of Israel. Here it is the application of certain interpretive or hermeneutic strategies that determines success or failure. Finally, as a single idea, history is conceived as the process of humanity seeking consciousness of itself, and this Coleridge expresses in a narrative of universal proportions, beginning in apostasy and ending in grace. Here teleology dominates, but as Coleridge discovers, this providential [End Page 718] history is a story that cannot be fully told, thought, or even, it turns out, imagined. It can only be postulated as an idea of reason or, in religious terminology, held as an article of faith. In a curious return to aesthetics Coleridge argues that for the grand historical narrative, just as for art... (shrink)

Bibliography (p. xxiv-xxv)--Autobiography.--Thoughts on poetry and its varieties.--Bentham.--Coleridge.--Nature.--On liberty.

From the end of the Enlightenment to the middle of the twentieth century philosophy took fascinating and controversial paths whose relevance to contemporary post-modernist thought is becoming increasingly clear. This volume traces the English-language side of the period, while also taking into account those continental thinkers who deeply influenced twentieth-century English-language philosophy. The story begins with Reid, Coleridge, and Bentham - who set the agenda for much that followed - and continues with a portrait of the nineteenth century's greatest (...) British philosopher, John Stuart Mill. It then surveys the cross-currents of thought at the end of the century, including American pragmatism, a movement never more influential than now. Finally, it assesses two phases of what John Skorupski calls `analytic modernism' - the revolution against the idealism of Moore and Russell, and the Viennese sequel whose project was to show that philosophy consists of pseudo-problems. (shrink)

Originally published in 1980, this is a study of the 'romanticism' of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Their concern with creativity, and the conditions that helped or hindered their own artistic development, produced a new concept of mental growth - a 'modern' view of the mind as organic, active, and unifying. In particular, we see how their aesthetics evolved from a personal and intuitional need to reaffirm 'value' in their own lives. Their discovery of the fundamental ambiguity of such intuition is (...) discussed in relation to some ideas of Empson, Gombrich, and Ehrenzweig. As well as an essay in criticism, this is a contribution to the history of ideas, drawing together points in the background of philosophical and psychological theory from Hartley and Wesley to John Stuart Mill. Since many of our ideas about imagination, symbolism, and creativity are ultimately derived from Coleridge and Wordsworth, this is a book for students of romantic and modern literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coleridge’s Intellectual Intuition, the Vision of God, and the Walled Garden of “Kubla Khan”Douglas HedleyIn his seminal work of 1917 Das Heilige Rudolph Otto quotes a number of passages as instances of the “Numinose.” Alongside those quotations from more conventional mystics, Plotinus, and Augustine, Otto refers to Coleridge’s “savage place” in Kubla Khan. 1 It is also pertinent that, when trying to define Romanticism, C. S. Lewis (...) appeals to the longing for the “unnameable something” fired by “morning cobwebs in late summer” or the “opening lines of Kubla Khan.” 2 Perhaps it is a mere coincidence that two of the most penetrating and influential scholars of religion in the twentieth century should appeal to Coleridge and his poem “Kubla Khan.” I wish to suggest reasons why the link between the imagery of “Kubla Khan” and a mystical experience of transcendence is not merely fortuitous. Indeed the connection between Coleridge’s mature writing and the imagery of the poem shows that we have good reason for seeing him as consciously writing, both as a poet and as a philosopher, within a visionary mystical tradition. I propose that it is no accident that Coleridge’s most visionary poem draws upon the central Christian image of paradise: the walled garden.This is an attempt not to interpret “Kubla Khan” but rather to suggest Coleridge’s place in the history of ideas as a Christian poet and philosopher. He is best described as an essentially speculative and mystical philosopher-theologian. 3 [End Page 115] By “speculative” I mean a theology inspired by those Church Fathers who emphasize the “vision” of God as an intellectual contemplation (speculari) of the transcendent Absolute, the prius of all being. The scholastics, the medieval German mystics, the Cambridge Platonists, and some of the German Idealists have all been influenced by such a speculative impulse. 4 Hegel uses the term “speculative” for his Dialectic. 5A philosophical or “speculative” approach to theology has invoked hostility from Tertullian onwards. Coleridge’s philosophy of religion often excited the fear of the new pantheistic German theology. John Henry Newman castigated Coleridge’s speculation as more heathen than Christian. Yet the speculative movement in theology spawned both a radical and a conservative wing, and we have to judge Coleridge’s thought in the light of the more conservative branch of nineteenth-century Idealism. D. F. Strauss jettisoned the transcendent “yonder” of traditional theology in favor of his philosophical or “scientific” approach to Christianity. Coleridge, however, could not adhere to theology of immanence; he wished to present a theology of an adamantly transcendent character.The walled garden is an eminently appropriate image of transcendence and was used as such by the fifteenth-century Christian Platonist Nicholas of Cusa, who is one of the links between Patristic theology and German Idealism. I shall draw upon his book The Vision of God as a paradigm of the sort of speculative mysticism which informs Coleridge’s metaphysics and much of his poetry. 6 Reflection upon an exotic poetic image may help us to clarify one of Coleridge’s philosophical tenets; the walled garden can be seen to symbolize that transcendent numinous reality, which the soul inchoately and barely consciously seeks and strives for.Coleridge’s “Mysticism” and the Imagery of “Kubla Khan”Richard Holmes claims that the “Kubla Khan” provides evidence of a transition in Coleridge’s interests and presents this switch from “classical and religious mythology” to the “drama of self-knowledge... the growth of consciousness and civilisation” as a key to Coleridge’s poetry. Holmes writes: [End Page 116][H]is instinct that the modern Epic subject must now centre on “the mind of man,” through “travels, voyages and histories,” shows a shift of poetic focus characteristic of the new Romantic age. The Epic could no longer draw on classical or religious mythology for the framework of its action. It must become contemporary with the world of scientific, anthropological, and psychological exploration: it must centre in some way on the drama of self-knowledge, on the growth of consciousness and civilisation. 7Coleridge would not have seen a conflict between the drama of self-consciousness and classical and religious mythology. In “Kubla... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic EducationGary PetersColeridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education, by Michael John Kooy. New York: Palgrave, 2002, 241 pp.Who reads Friedrich Schiller today? With the Aesthetic Education of Man struggling to remain in print in the English-speaking world (at least in the UK, from where I am writing this) it would seem fewer and fewer readers are prepared to engage with (or be educated by) (...) this once influential aestheticization of the world; and as for Marcuse on Schiller, or the young(er) Frederic Jameson on Schiller and Marcuse, they, too, seem to be speaking from another era, an ancient time when the humanist utopian promise could still be taken seriously. Promises are made to be broken, of course, especially the promesse de bonheur, but are we right to feel betrayed by the assorted Schillerians who so passionately raised our hopes, only to fall silent when they were so comprehensively dashed? Perhaps betrayal is putting it too strongly, but the fact remains that we seem to have ended up with a notion of aesthetic education that educates nobody, not even those within art education who need it more than most. But then perhaps the whole notion of aesthetic education as a promise is itself fundamentally flawed, the product of a political reading—the politicization of the aestheticization of the world—that casts the lessons of the aesthetic into the future rather than engaging with the event of the artwork as it erupts in a "now," which is aporetic in the extreme, and thus ill-equipped [End Page 119] to radicalize the unradic1al mind or mobilize the immobile.Clearly, Michael John Kooy reads Schiller today, but, having said that, it is never made entirely clear who he is writing for. Indeed, we may ask, does he have much of an audience at all or is he speaking too long and too late into the vacuum left by the collapse of humanist optimism? His own position is an interesting one, as both a literary theorist and a philosopher; one of the real strengths of the book is Kooy's pursuit of philosophical ideas in the body of Schiller's and Coleridge's dramatic and poetic work, often to good effect, but, to ask the question again, who is listening? Philosophers? Writers? Professional academics or the nonacademic audience that one would assume was always the intended beneficiary of the concept of aesthetic education?To attempt to think around some of these questions, without necessarily trying to answer them, we might start by considering who the philosophical audience for this book might be. My guess is that the philosophy of education, the subgenre of philosophy that might benefit from an aesthetic education itself, will be largely deaf to the message running through these pages. Long dominated by an ethical, religious, and liberal political agenda, the philosophy of education in its hegemonic Anglo-American guise has never made much room for the aesthetic, particularly in its "continental" radical incarnation—far too woolly, idealist, utopian, far too "arty." So, not much of an outlet here, but, having said that, the recent Anglo-American fascination with the very "continental" notion of Bildung might prove to be a fruitful point of contact, and Kooy does devote some useful pages and a substantial epilogue to a discussion of this thorny subject. There is a problem here, however, in that while Kooy is excellent when thinking through the dissonance between the teleological purposiveness of Schiller's and Coleridge's conceptions of universal history, so important to their notion of aesthetic education as a cultural model, and the very different self-substantiating autonomy of Bildung, he is much less engaged with the more fundamental pedagogical issues that arise within the particularity of the teaching encounter: How is the necessary autonomy of aesthetic education to be taught without thereby jeopardizing that very autonomy? It is at this point that a philosophical audience (one engaged in continental philosophy, that is) might have expected a more thorough account of the deeply problematical relationship between the Schillerian notion of aesthetic education and the aesthetics to be found in Kant's Critique of Judgement, its acknowledged source. This is not... (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Coleridge's view of science as at once a branch of knowledge and a creative activity, mediating between man and nature, and thereby complementing poetry. Coleridge was well-informed about contemporary science. He stressed the symbolic status of scientific language, the role of scientific genius, and the need in science to rely upon reason rather than the unqualified senses. Kepler and, more recently, John Hunter and Humphry Davy provided his favorite instances of scientific genius, (...) while chemistry—Davy's not Lavoisier's—was poetic. Science and poetry could both rely on reason, the power of language, and faithfulness to nature. (shrink)

Douglas Hedley’s study reveals Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a leading figure in the nineteenth-century revival of Christian Platonism. This tradition flourished at Cambridge in the seventeenth century until it was eclipsed by the Lockean tradition, which prevailed in the eighteenth century among Christians as well as nonbelievers. Coleridge’s theological work was explicitly a polemic against the Cambridge empiricists. His importance was such that John Stuart Mill divided Victorians into “Benthamites and Coleridgeans”.

The esteemed psychologist and thinker John Dewey headed for previously unexplored philosophical territory with this influential work. Written shortly after World War I, it embodies Dewey's system of pragmatic humanism and maintains that individuals can attain "a more ordered and intelligent happiness" by reconsidering the ultimate effects of their deepest beliefs and feelings. With its promise of achieving an understanding of the past and attaining a brighter future, Reconstruction in Philosophy remains ever relevant. "A modern classic." — Philosophy and (...) Phenomenological Research. (shrink)

Nicholas Capaldi's biography of John Stuart Mill traces the ways in which Mill's many endeavours are related and explores the significance of Mill's contribution to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of education. He shows how Mill was groomed for his life by both his father James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham, the two most prominent philosophical radicals of the early nineteenth century. Yet Mill revolted against this education and developed friendships with (...) both Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who introduced him to Romanticism and political conservatism. A special feature of this biography is the attention devoted to his relationship with Harriet Taylor. No one exerted a greater influence than the woman he was eventually to marry. Nicholas Capaldi reveals just how deep her impact was on Mill's thinking about the emancipation of women. (shrink)

The paper offers an interpretation of a classical study of Coleridge’s poetry: The Road to Xanadu by John Livingstone Lowes published in 1927. While Lowes’ book is considered a monumental work summarizing the sources of Coleridge’s poetic image, the paper tries to show that in addition to that Lowes develops a remarkable theory of imagination close to certain themes of Freud’s theory of dream-work, as well as to Warburg’s interpretation of Boticelli or Havlí?ek’s conception of poetic image.

In his recent book Criticism and Social Change Frank Lentricchia melodramatically pits his critical hero Kenneth Burke, advocate of the intellect’s intervention in social life, against the villainous Paul de Man, “undisputed master in the United States of what is called deconstruction.” Lentricchia charges that “the insidious effect of [de Man’s] work is not the proliferating replication of his way of reading … but the paralysis of praxis itself: an effect that traditionalism, with its liberal view of the division of (...) culture and political power, should only applaud.”1 He goes on to prophesy thatThe deconstruction of deconstruction will reveal, against apparent intention, a tacit political agenda after all, one that can only embarrass deconstruction, particularly its younger proponents whose activist experiences within the socially wrenching upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s will surely not permit them easily to relax, without guilt and self-hatred, into resignation and ivory tower despair. [CSC, p. 40]Such is Lentricchia’s strenuous conjuration of a historical moment in which he can forcefully intervene—a summons fraught with the pathos excited by any reference to the heady days of political enthusiasm during the war in Vietnam. Lentricchia ominously figures a scene of rueful solitude where de Manian lucidity breaks into the big chill. And maybe it will. But Lentricchia furnishes no good reason why it should. De Manian deconstruction is “deconstructed” by Lentricchia to reveal “against apparent intention, a tacit political agenda.” And this revelation is advertised as a sure embarrassment to the younger practitioners of deconstruction—sweepingly characterized as erstwhile political activists who have, wide-eyed, opted for a critical approach that magically entangles its proponents in the soul-destroying delights of rhetoric and reaction. Left unexamined in Lentricchia’s story, however, is the basis for the initial rapport between radicalism and deconstruction. Why should collegiate activists have turned into deconstructionsists? Is not that, in Lentricchia’s terms, the same question as asking why political activists should have turned to literary criticism at all? If we suppose this original turn to be intentional, how could the initiates of this critical approach ever be genuinely betrayed into embarrassment by time or by its herald, Frank Lentricchia? On the face of it, the traducement of a secret intention would be unlikely to come as a surprise, since deconstructing deconstruction is not only the enterprise of Marxist critics like Lentricchia but also of Jacques Derrida, archdeconstructor, who unashamedly identified the embarrassment of intention as constitutive of the deconstructive method. If deconstruction is at once a natural outlet for activists and the first step on a slippery slope that ends in apostasy , it suggests a phenomenon with contours more suggestively intricate, if not less diabolically seductive, than the program Lentricchia outlines. And it is a phenomenon as worrisomely affiliative as it is bafflingly intricate. We need to know whether the relations between deconstruction and radical politics, between deconstruction and apostasy between deconstruction and criticism, and between apostasy and criticism are necessary or contingent, or neither and both at once. 1. Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change , p. 38; all further references to this work, abbreviated CSC, will be included in the text. Jerome Christensen, professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language and the forthcoming Hume’s Practice: The Career of an Enlightenment Man of Letters. He is currently at work on a study of Byron and the issue of strong romanticism. (shrink)

With precision and profundity born of 30 years of devoted study, John Boyle offers an essential introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas on Scripture, shedding helpful light on the goals, methods, and commitments that animate the Angelic Doctor's engagement with the sacred page. Because the genius of St. Thomas's approach to the Bible lies not so much in its novelty but rather in the fidelity and clarity with which he recapitulates the riches of the preceding interpretive Tradition, this initiation into (...) St. Thomas's vision of Scripture is itself an orientation to the Church's vision of Scripture, from the Fathers through and beyond the Middle Ages. St. Thomas's embeddedness within the Church's Tradition and his own historical context is integral to his approach to Scripture, yet it sets him at some distance from modern readers, for whom his interpretive vision may seem perplexing or even impenetrable. In this Primer, Boyle first provides an acclimation to this medieval context through a survey and explanation of pertinent technical terminology used by St. Thomas and characteristic of the scholastic theology of the time. With an eye to the medieval practice of considering Scripture according to the fourfold division of causes, Boyle builds on this initial foundation by exploring in turn St. Thomas's accounts of the end or use of Scripture (final cause), its divine and human authorship (efficient cause), its order and division (material cause), and its literary styles or genres (formal cause). Drawing on writings from across St. Thomas's corpus, but especially his work On the Commendation and Division of Sacred Scripture and the prologues to his biblical commentaries, Boyle masterfully elucidates both the hermeneutical principles and deep wisdom of the Angelic Doctor's approach to Scripture, imparting invaluable guidance not only for reading and understanding St. Thomas and other great masters of the Tradition, but also-and ultimately-for understanding Scripture in light of this Tradition and reading it with greater benefit and joy. (shrink)

Despite recurring efforts, a gap exists across a variety of contexts between the protection of patients' safety in theory and in practice. This timely Research Handbook highlights these critical issues and suggests both legal and policy changes are necessary to better protect patients' safety. Multidisciplinary in nature, this Research Handbook features contributions from eminent academics, policy makers and medical practitioners from the Global North and South, discussing the essential facets concerning patient safety and the law. It highlights how the role (...) of legislation and case law has the potential to influence, both positively and negatively, medical practice and the quality of care. Chapters explore patient safety and the global health agenda; physiotherapy; 'non-therapeutic' clinical research with children; patient safety awareness in healthcare education; and the increasing use of robotics and artificial intelligence in healthcare. Outlining a wide range of international perspectives on patient safety and the law, this Research Handbook will appeal to academics and researchers specialising in health and medical law, human rights and healthcare regulation. It will also serve as a valuable resource for legal and medical practitioners alike, as well as clinicians and professionals working in healthcare governance. (shrink)