1st Edition
British Idealism Language, Aesthetics and Emotions
Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and other analytic philosophers of the early 20th century claimed to depart from the British idealists who dominated philosophical debate from the 1870s onwards. The nature and extent of this departure is now widely questioned as philosophers return to the writings of Bernard Bosanquet, F. H. Bradley, R. G. Collingwood, T. H. Green, J. M. E. McTaggart, and others.
Nowadays, the British idealist movement is mostly remembered for its seminal contributions to metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy. The contributors to this volume explore some of the movement’s other, equally-insightful, contributions to the philosophies of language, aesthetics and emotions. These chapters cover core philosophical issues including the relationship between the speech communities and the general will; the role of emotions in the Absolute; key differences between leading British idealists on the relationships between emotions and relations; the nature of love; the historical re-enactment of imagination and creativity; expressivism in art; and the actual idealism of the British idealists’ Italian counterparts.
This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of the History of Philosophy.
1. Introduction - Language, aesthetics and emotions in the work of the British idealists 2. The general will and the speech community: British Idealism and the foundations of politics 3. Emotion and satisfaction in the philosophy of F.H. Bradley 4. From the bankruptcy of relations to the reality of connections: language and semantics in Bradley and Bosanquet 5. Taking love seriously: McTaggart, absolute reality and chemistry 6. Re-enactment, reconstruction and the freedom of the imagination: Collingwood on history and art 7. Feeling, emotion and imagination: in defence of Collingwood’s expression theory of art 8. Thinking and feeling in actual idealism
Biography
Colin Tyler and James Connelly are the founding Directors of the Centre for Idealism and the New Liberalism at Hull University, UK. Both have written extensively on the field, covering philosophers from T. H. Green to R. G. Collingwood, and Michael Oakeshott.
