Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose

Abstract

This 2003 study sheds light on the way in which the English Romantics dealt with the basic problems of knowledge, particularly as they inherited them from the philosopher David Hume. Kant complained that the failure of philosophy in the eighteenth century to answer empirical scepticism had produced a culture of 'indifferentism'. Tim Milnes explores the way in which Romantic writers extended this epistemic indifference through their resistance to argumentation, and finds that it exists in a perpetual state of tension with a compulsion to know. This tension is most clearly evident in the prose writing of the period, in works such as Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. Milnes argues that it is in their oscillation between knowledge and indifference that the Romantics prefigure the ambivalent negotiations of modern post-analytic philosophy.

On Rewriting Buddhism

“…15. See Milnes andSinanan (2010), Trilling (1972), Asad (2018), Viswanath (2013), D. Scott (1994), and Seligman et al (2008. Alan Strathern (2017) remains oblivious to the colonial genealogy of authenticity and sincerity.…”

“…50. Such figures as Shaftesbury came to attack 'inspiration' as something inessential to the freedom of creativity when the notion of 'sublime' was making entry into the philosophical vocabulary (Milnes 1997). 51.…”

Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience

“…Between the two epistemological readings, de Bolla's is the more generous, taking seriously Wordsworth's belief that 'being affected by absent things as if they are present' could be 'a form of knowing' (50). Bennett's more sceptical account draws on previous work on romantic indifference, while de Bolla's recalls his earlier sensitivity to textual ghosts (de Bolla, 2001;Milnes, 2007). Alexander Regier's discussion of repetition in and around 'The Thorn' ('Words Worth Repeating') presents a case for 'thinking in contradictory oppositions' (63).…”