Academic literature on the topic 'Critical thinking. Critical thinking Historical criticism Culture Philosophy. History'

Christianity was the religion of spirit (and freedom), and critiqued Islam as a religion of flesh (and slavery); later, Christianity was the religion of reason, and critiqued Islam as the religion of fideism; later still, Christianity was the religion of the critique of religion, and critiqued Islam as the most atavistic of religions. Even now, when the West has critiqued its own Chris- tianity enough to be properly secular (because free, rational, and critical), it continues to critique Islam for being not secular enough. In contrast to Christianity or post-Christian secularism, then, and despite their best ef- forts, Islam does not know (has not learned from) critique. This sentiment is articulated at multiple registers, academic and popular and governmen- tal: Muslims are fanatical about their repressive law; they interpret things too literally; Muslims do not read their own revelation critically, let alone literature or cartoons; their sartorial practices are unreasonable; the gates of ijtihād closed in 900CE; Ghazali killed free inquiry in Islam… Such claims are ubiquitous enough to be unremarkable, and have political traction among liberals and conservatives alike. “The equation of Islam with the ab- sence of critique has a longer genealogy in Western thought,” Irfan Ahmad writes in this book, “which runs almost concurrently with Europe’s colonial expansion” (8). Luther and Renan figure in that history, as more recently do Huntington and Gellner and Rushdie and Manji.Meanwhile in the last decade an interdisciplinary conversation about the stakes, limits, complicities, and possibilities of critique has developed in the anglophone academy, a conversation of which touchstones include the polemical exchange between Saba Mahmood and Stathis Gourgouris (2008); the co-authored volume Is Critique Secular? (2009), by Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Mahmood; journal special issues dedi- cated to the question (e.g. boundary 2 40, no. 1 [2013]); and Gourgouris’s Lessons in Secular Criticism (2013), among others. At the same time, the discipline of religious studies remains trapped in an argument over the lim- its of normative analysis and the possibility of critical knowledge.Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Mar- ketplace seeks to turn these debates on their head. Is critique secular? Decidedly not—but understanding why that is, for Ahmad, requires revising our understanding of critique itself. Instead of the object of critique, reli- gion here emerges as an agent of critique. By this account, God himself is the source of critique, and the prophets and their heirs are “critics par ex- cellence” (xiv). The book is divided into two parts bookended by a prologue and epilogue. “Formulation” comprises three chapters levying the shape of the argument. “Illustration” comprises three chapters taking up the case study of the South Asian reformer Abul-A‘la Maududi and his critics (es- pecially regarding his views on the state and on women) as well as a fourth chapter that seeks to locate critique in the space of the everyday. There are four theses to Ahmad’s argument, none of them radically original on their own but newly assembled. As spelled out in the first chap- ter (“Introduction”), the first thesis holds that the Enlightenment reconfig- uration of Christianity was in fact an ethnic project by which “Europe/the West constituted its identity in the name of reason and universalism against a series of others,” among them Islam (14). The second thesis is that no crit- ic judges by reason alone. Rather, critique is always situated, directed, and formed: it requires presuppositions and a given mode to be effective (17). The third thesis is that the Islamic tradition of critique stipulates the com- plementarity of intellect (‘aql, dimāgh) and heart (qalb, dil); this is a holistic anthropology, not a dualistic one. The fourth thesis is that critique should not be understood as the exclusive purview of intellectuals (especially when arguing about literature) or as simply a theoretical exercise. Instead, cri- tique should be approached as part of life, practiced by the literate and the illiterate alike (18).The second chapter, “Critique: Western and/or Islamic,” focuses on the first of these theses. The Enlightenment immunized the West from critique while subjecting the Rest to critique. An “anthropology of philosophy” approach can treat Kant’s transcendental idealism as a social practice and in doing so discover that philosophy is “not entirely independent” from ethnicity (37). The certainty offered by the Enlightenment project can thus be read as “a project of security with boundaries.” Ahmad briefly consid- ers the place of Islam across certain of Kant’s writings and the work of the French philosophes; he reads their efforts to “secure knowledge of humani- ty” to foreclose the possibility of “knowledge from humanity” (42), namely Europe’s others. Meanwhile, ethnographic approaches to Muslim debates shy away from according them the status of critique, but in so doing they only maintain the opposition between Western reason and Islamic unrea- son. In contrast to this view (from Kant through Foucault), Ahmad would rather locate the point of critical rupture with the past in the axial age (800-200BCE), which would include the line of prophets who reformed (critiqued) their societies for having fallen into corruption and paganism. This alternative account demonstrates that “critical inquiry presupposes a tradition,” that is, that effective critique is always immanent (58). The third chapter, “The Modes: Another Genealogy of Critique,” con- tests the reigning historiography of “critique” (tanqīd/naqd) in South Asia that restricts it to secular literary criticism. Critique (like philosophy and democracy) was not simply founded in Grecian antiquity and inherited by Europe: Ahmad “liberates” critique from its Western pedigree and so allows for his alternative genealogy, as constructed for instance through readings of Ghalib. The remainder of the chapter draws on the work of Maududi and his critics to present the mission of the prophets as critiquing to reform (iṣlāḥ) their societies. This mandate remains effective today, and Maududi and his critics articulate a typology of acceptable (tanqīd) and unacceptable (ta‘īb, tanqīṣ, tazhīk, takfīr, etc.) critiques in which the style of critique must be considered alongside its object and telos. Religion as Critique oscillates between sweeping literature reviews and close readings. Readers may find the former dizzying, especially when they lose in depth what they gain in breadth (for example, ten pages at hand from chapter 2 cite 44 different authors, some of whom are summarizing or contesting the work of a dozen other figures named but not cited di- rectly). Likewise there are moments when Ahmad’s own dogged critiques may read as tendentious. The political purchase of this book should not be understated, though the fact that Muslims criticize themselves and others should come as no surprise. Yet it is chapters 4–6 (on Maududi and his critics) which substantiate the analytic ambition of the book. They are the most developed chapters of the book and detail a set of emerging debates with a fine-grained approach sometimes found wanting elsewhere (espe- cially in the final chapter). They show how Islam as a discursive tradition is constituted through critique, and perhaps always has been: for against the disciplinary proclivities of anthropologists (who tend to emphasize discon- tinuity and rupture, allowing them to discover the modern invention of traditions), Ahmad insists on an epistemic connection among precolonial and postcolonial Islam. This connection is evident in how the theme of rupture/continuity is itself a historical topos of “Islamic critical thinking.” Chapter 4 (“The Message: A Critical Enterprise”) approaches Maududi (d. 1979) as a substantial political thinker, not simply the fundamentalist ideologue he is often considered to be. Reading across Maududi’s oeuvre, Ahmad gleans a political-economic critique of colonial-capitalist exploita- tion (95), a keen awareness of the limits of majoritarian democracy, and a warning about the dispossessive effects of minoritization. Maududi’s Isla- mism (“theodemocracy”), then, has to be understood within his broader project of the revival of religion to which tanqīd (“critique”), tajdīd (“re- newal”), and ijtihād (“understanding Islam’s universal principles to de- termine change”) were central (103). He found partial historical models for such renewal in ‘Umar b. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyya, Ahmad Sirhindi, and Shah Wali Ullah. A key element of this critique is that it does not aim to usher in a different future. Instead it inhabits a more complicated temporality: it clarifies what is already the case, as rooted in the primordial nature of humans (fiṭra), and in so doing aligns the human with the order of creation. This project entails the critique and rejection of false gods, in- cluding communism, fascism, national socialism, and capitalism (117). Chapter 5 (“The State: (In)dispensible, Desirable, Revisable?”) weaves together ethnographic and textual accounts of Maududi’s critics and de- fenders on the question of the state (the famous argument for “divine sov- ereignty”). In doing so the chapter demonstrates how the work of critique is undertaken in this Islamic tradition, where, Ahmad writes, “critique is connected to a form of life the full meaning of which is inseparable from death” (122). (This also means that at stake in critique is also the style and principles of critique.) The critics surveyed in this chapter include Manzur Nomani, Vahiduddin Khan, Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi, Amir Usmani, Sadrud- din Islahi, Akram Zurti, Rahmat Bedar, Naqi Rahman, Ijaz Akbar, and others, figures of varying renown but all of whom closely engaged, defend- ed, and contested Maududi’s work and legacy in the state politics of his Jamaat-e Islami. Chapter 6 (“The Difference: Women and In/equality”) shows how Maududi’s followers critique the “neopatriarchate” he proposes. Through such critique, Ahmad also seeks to affirm the legitimacy of a “nonpatri- archal reading of Islam” (156). If Maududi himself regarded the ḥarem as “the mightiest fortress of Islamic culture” (159)—a position which Ahmad notes is “enmeshed in the logic of colonial hegemony”—he also desired that women “form their own associations and unbiasedly critique the govern- ment” (163). Maududi’s work and legacy is thus both “disabling” and “en- abling” for women at the same time, as is borne out by tracing the critiques it subsequently faced (including by those sympathetic to his broader proj- ect). The (male) critics surveyed here include Akram Zurti, Sultan Ahmad Islahi, Abdurrahman Alkaf, and Mohammad Akram Nadwi, who seriously engaged the Quran and hadith to question Maududi’s “neopatriarchate.” They critiqued his views (e.g. that women were naturally inferior to men, or that they were unfit for political office) through alternative readings of Islamic history and theology. Chapter 7 (“The Mundane: Critique as Social-Cultural Practice”) seeks to locate critique at “the center of life for everyone, including ordinary sub- jects with no educational degrees” (179). Ahmad writes at length about Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (d. 1988), the anticolonial activist who led a massive movement against colonial domination, and whose following faced British brutality with nonviolence. The Khudai Khidmatgār movement he built was “a movement of critique” (195), Ahmad writes, composed of or- dinary men and women, peasants and the unlettered. The brief remainder of the chapter suggests that the proverbs which punctuate everyday life (for example, in the trope of the greedy mullah) also act as critiques. By the end of Religion as Critique it is difficult not to see critique na- scent in every declaration or action. This deflates the analytic power of the term—but perhaps that is one unstated aim of the project, to reveal critique as simply a part of life. Certainly the book displaces the exceptional West- ern claim to critique. Yet this trope of exposure—anthropology as cultural critique, the ethnographer’s gaze turned inward—also raises questions of its own. In this case, the paradigmatic account of critique (Western, sec- ular) has been exposed as actually being provincial. But the means of this exposure have not come from the alternative tradition of critique Ahmad elaborates. That is, Ahmad is not himself articulating an Islamic critique of Western critique. (Maududi serves as an “illustration” of Ahmad’s ar- gument; Maududi does not provide the argument itself.) In the first chap- ters (“Formulation”) he cites a wide literature that practices historicism, genealogy, archeology, and deconstruction in order to temper the universal claims of Western supremacists. The status of these latter critical practices however is not explored, as to whether they are in themselves sufficient to provincialize or at least de-weaponize Western critique. Put more directly: is there is a third language (of political anthropology, for example) by which Ahmad analytically mediates the encounter between rival traditions of cri- tique? And if there is such a language, and if it is historically, structurally, and institutionally related to one of the critical traditions it is mediating, then what is the status of the non-Western “illustration”? The aim of this revision of critique, Ahmad writes, is “genuinely dem- ocratic dialogue with different traditions” (xii). As much is signalled in its citational practices, which (for example) reference Talal Asad and Viveiros de Castro together in calling for “robust comparison” (14) between West- ern and Islamic notions of critique, and reference Maududi and Koselleck together in interpreting critique to be about judgment (203). No matter that Asad and de Castro or Maududi and Koselleck mean different things when using the same words; these citations express Ahmad’s commitment to a dialogic (rather than dialectical) mode in engaging differences. Yet because Ahmad does not himself explore what is variously entailed by “comparison” or “judgment” in these moments, such citations remain as- sertions gesturing to a dialogue to come. In this sense Religion as Critique is a thoroughly optimistic book. Whether such optimism is warranted might call for a third part to follow “Formulation” and “Illustration”: “Reckoning.” Basit Kareem IqbalPhD candidate, Department of Anthropologyand Program in Critical TheoryUniversity of California, Berkeley

Abstract This article shows that the question of “Historical Thinking and the Human” demands expanding the field of the philosophy of history. What I propose is to investigate the issue from two perspectives: firstly, by positioning it in the broader philosophical context, one that increasingly transcends the boundaries of the humanities to enter the realm of the life sciences; and secondly, by drawing on a wider range of analytical material than has usually been the case in classic works in the philosophy of history. I will critically reflect upon history’s anthropocentric biases, highlighting the need to develop an alternative to history. My thinking is aligned, on the one hand, with notions of the agency of images that have emerged from art criticism and visual culture studies (W.J.T. Mitchell), and, on the other hand, with the idea of theriomorphism, which I explore in terms of new animism, new totemism and philosophical ethology (Roberto Marchesini). In my analysis of works by the South African artist Nandipha Mntambo (cowhides and Europa), I argue that a future-oriented redefinition of the human should transcend the limited categories that have emerged within the framework of history understood as a Eurocentric approach to the past rooted in Greco-Judaic-Christian tradition.

The thesis addresses the issue of functioning of philosophy in popular culture. The representative example for this problem is literature popularizing philosophy. The major historical determinants of the idea of propagating and disseminating philosophy have been indicated. An analysis of propaedeutic literature of philosophy has been carried out on the basis of the following criteria: history, selected issues, critical and systematic thinking, orientation toward the method/style of philosophizing. The main goal of the thesis is to attempt to explain the importance of all introductions to philosophy aimed at strengthening popular culture. The last decades are characterized by varied proposals in this regard, which the presented paper tries to discuss in detail. The convention of contemporary postmodern formation (homogenization, universal accessibility, universality) seems to foster these kinds of activities.

AbstractThis article aims at examining the admissible scope of limitations on critical thinking on religious issues and the circumstances under which criticism of a religion may fall within the scope of Article 20 of the ICCPR. What does this imply in relation to freedom of expression, in particular artistic freedom? To what extent does the promotion of freedom of expression require States to punish advocacy of religious hatred which constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence? The main premise of the article is that the questions mentioned above should be seen in terms of the balance and complementarity of competing rights, namely, the right to freedom of religion and respect for human dignity of believers vis-à-vis the right to freedom of expression. This balance cannot invariably be set for all places, but should instead be maintained taking into account the historical experiences and local conditions. Furthermore, the article argues that the right to freedom of expression is not absolute and that international human rights law affirms certain restrictions on exercising this right. The question, however, of where to draw the boundaries between the right to freedom of expression and advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence can best be answered contextually and with due regard to, inter alia, local conditions, history, culture and political tensions.

IT HAS BECOME SOMETHING of a commonplace in recent criticism to claim that the Holocaust inaugurates a ''crisis of representation.'' To read, understand, and transmit a historical trauma of this magnitude is to confront the boundaries of the thinkable and the sayable. This essay critically examines the emergence of a theoretical current that presents the Holocaust primarily as a trauma that - as trauma - opens up unlocatable and unrepresentable forms of knowledge. It argues that the overwhelming focus on trauma as an optic for viewing the Nazi genocide leads to a dangerous conflation of the differences between victims, executioners, witnesses (primary and secondary); between literal and metaphorical survival and culpability; and between historical event and metaphorical, transhistorical condition. For a generation that did not live through the Holocaust but encountered it as secondary witnesses, as readers and viewers of films and documentaries, a sense of metaphorical survival and second-hand guilt seems to be an inescapable condition of Holocaust reception. Theoretical approaches to representations and testimonies of the Holocaust, especially in the wake of deconstruction, increasingly rely on models of contamination, complicity, and trauma. Such models complicate not only the difference between victims and executioners within the camps, but also the differences between witnesses, bystanders, and successive generations of secondary witnesses. Primo Levi's description of a ''gray zone'' in the concentration camp (in The Drowned and the Saved) has played a crucial role in this recent focus on the traumatized culpability of the secondary witness. The ''gray zone'' describes situations that blurred and even dismantled the opposition between victims and executioners (as in the case of the Special Squads, or Sonderkommando s, composed primarily of Jewish prisoners working in the crematorium). This essay argues that Levi's ''gray zone'' is now deployed as a figure in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth, and Shoshana Felman. Identifying proximities in their views of trauma and testimony, the essay shows how Levi's ''gray zone'' is transformed into an overarching metaphorical framework for thinking not only about the Holocaust, but more broadly, about history, subjectivity,and ethics in the fields of psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and literary criticism. This hypostasis of the ''gray zone'' not only erases the historical specificity of the Nazi genocide, but also subsumes the irreducibly distinct positions of victim, executioner, witness, accomplice, and proxy-witness under a general condition of traumatic complicity. The essay concludes with a paired reading of Albert Camus's La chute and Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, suggesting that Camus's novel, while often read as an exemplary testimony to historical trauma, instead stages some of the ethical and political problems of reading history through the optic of trauma.

The article discusses how to implement common cultural competencies in the course of teaching philosophy. The authors believe that the optimal content of the course is the history of philosophy, which, when being creatively taught, can become a school of critical thinking and education and give direction to those who are trying to consciously shape their world view and educate their mind. The historical-philosophical approach organically incorporates the problematic one, makes it possible to discuss current issues of the day, based on classical examples of the philosophical culture. Some techniques for the development of cognitive skills that correspond to the strategies of liberal education are considered. The authors draw attention to the benefits of the work of a student with a philosophical text, the need for the development of written and oral speech, organically associated with the development of thinking. In the conditions of increasing bureaucratic regulation of the educational process and limited time, it is important to preserve the space of academic freedom, to build teaching taking into account the individual-personal contact with this or that audience. University philosophy is regarded as a valuable experience in overcoming the limitations of everyday consciousness, it seems to be a source of ideas that provides support in a situation of epistemological uncertainty and value relativism. The article covers both philosophical and theoretical, and applied aspects of the problem of teaching philosophy in higher education institution.

The image of the Enlightenment as an era has proved to be remarkably constant, repeatedly resisting protracted and subtle attempts to de-ideologize, pluralize, and reperiodize it. Historians have turned away from a pure history of ideas in favor of a cultural history of publishing and reading, a social history of intellectual sociability, and the situating of ideas within historical-political constellations. The concept of a homogeneous, quasi-monolithic Enlightenment has been pluralized and parceled into a large number of geographically and thematically distinct Enlightenments. At the same time, the chronological scope of research interests has been extended and refined. Whereas the decades of the high Enlightenment in Britain and France were the initial focus of interest, the phase of the radical early Enlightenment has since achieved a firm place in a total panorama that also takes account of chronologically different developments in various national contexts. Nonetheless it is true, although necessarily a generalization, to say that the interpretation of the Enlightenment as a whole concentrates on an “Enlightenment thinking” characterized as rational, critical of dogma, and systematic, and whose main emphases are seen as political ideas, philosophy, criticism of superstition, and the experimental sciences. The intention here is to focus on the aspect of active mass participation in the intellectual project of the Enlightenment and to supplement the image of an intellectual history centered on the triad of ideas, authors, and texts (more rarely books) with a perspective that focuses on learned practice.

A large part of German musicology sees itself as a science of art in the emphatic sense and is committed to quite different principles than historical-critical approaches in the discipline. The latter seek to gain a realistic picture of the history of music, including contemporary ways of thinking, and allow for historical actors to make meaningful, free will decisions within anthropologically determined circumstances. The emphatic science of art, on the other hand, claims to be able to prove and scientifically determine the objects of great art music and their nature. It originated during the Enlightenment, when philosophy took the place of religion and created ever new theoretical constructs of thought presented as scientifically proven and binding. In music, Beethoven rose to the ideal of the ingenious creator, who embodied the progress and achievements of mankind on the path toward perfection. Thus, in the course of the 19th century, a Beethoven cult developed using philosophy as its guide in selecting and evaluating historical sources, gladly accepting literary testimonies as historical fact. Historical criticism, which revealed this construction of a romantic image of Beethoven, was suppressed for a long time. Society’s broad acceptance of the notion of the evolutionary progress of mankind, one to which modernity adhered, proved too powerful, and belief in it took the form of an art religion. Beethoven as Zeus of the Third Reich, as the god of modernity, was the program and message of the 14th Secession Exhibition in Vienna in 1902. This image was destructed in the late 20th century.

The article under studies is a critical survey of the activities of a Swiss scholar Juozas Eretas (1896–1984), one of the founders of Lithuanian Literary Studies, whose origin is closely related to the revival of the Lithuanian State (1918 р). Raised on the principles of the so-called Fribourg School, J. Eretas may be regarded as a vivid example of a catholic scientist. He emphasized the importance of the connection between research and thinking. In the 20-30s, having mastered the Lithuanian language, under the influence of the first translations of the world literary works into Lithuanian, Eretas laid the foundation of analytical criticism. He also took up the translation and, at the same time, became the founder of Lithuanian Germanic Studies, paying most of his attention to the Medieval German Literature, the heritage of mystics, the literature of “storm and drive”, particularly the works by Goethe and Schiller. In addition, Eretas made a considerable contribution to Lithuanian Theory of Literature: “Creating Philosophical Criticism in Literature” (lecture, 1922), “Philosophy and Poetry” (1924), “Methods of Literary Analysis” (1929). Eretas’ approach to German Literature was purely conceptual and rested on the idea of its universal nature (especially concerning Goethe): monographs “Young Goethe” (1932) and “Goethe Hundred Years Later” (1933). It is worth mentioning Eretas’ attitude to Goethe’s “Faust”. He interprets the main character typologically, as an eternal image of the world culture, pointing hereby to the increased attention to this image during the epoch of “storm and drive”. Eretas’ interpretation of the images of Faust and Mephistopheles, which present the idea of “dual world” that is so peculiar for Romanticism, seems very interesting and promising. Besides, Eretas was first in Lithuanian Literary Studies to refer to Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship” as to the novel of upbringing. Another significant subject of Eretas’ research was the History of World Mystics (the work “From the History of Mystics”, as well as the monographs on Tauler, Eckhart and Suso).

The article «Eurocentrism as the source of Y. Kosach’s outlook» investigates the problem of Occident and Ori- ent in Y. Kosach’s literary-critical legacy. The concepts of «Europe» and «West» in the writer’s apprehension are considered in details. The conceptualization of epochs and historical figures in the context of culture, politics and history is traced. The main attention is paid to the problem of the affinity of Ukrainian and Western European cultures, the basis of which is the common feature – the synthesis of experiment and tradition, what matches Ukrainian nation as a European nation with the millennial state past. The problem of eternal connection of Ukraine with the West’s tradition is seen as the main axis around which Kosach concentrated all other problems. At the same time, attention is also focused on the unifying features of the Ukrainian writ- ers’ style, which Kosach distinguishes for analysis, meaning not the «form of content», but the «style of content». Similarly, in the close connection with the problem of the occidentality of Ukrainian culture, the problem of the «Ukrainian mission of the defense of Western Civilization» and the painful problems connected not only with Ukrainian history but also with the Ukrainian character, the Ukrainian way of thinking are considered. The author emphasizes that as a result of a poetic research, the artist created the myth-poetic conception of Ukrainian state existence, imagining Ukraine as «Imperium Ucrainum», «Third Rome», convinced that empires do not die, continuing to live in myths, capturing the thoughts of contemporaries, becoming a ground on which the former might and glory of the state are reviving. Аccording to Kosach, just writers perform the function of development and dissemination of national myths in society – repeatedly in the history of mankind the works of literature played the role of a vector of direction of public tastes. Thus, «Aeneid» by Virgil became the cornerstone of the imperial ideological concept by Octavian Augustus, and «An- dromaque» by Racine led the political ground for the legitimate rule of Louis XIV from the rulers of Troy. Much attention is paid to Kosach’s criticism of «Polish mythology» by A. Mickiewicz and H. Sienkievicz; dependence between «Polish mythology» and creation of own Kosach’s mythology is established in the literary essay «On the guard of the nation». The article emphasizes the relevance and far-sightedness of Y. Kosach’s views through the conception of such an old-new concept as «information warfare».

This book explores some of the exultant visions inspired by Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s close scrutiny of the night sky, the natural world, and the domains of science. It examines a set of scientific patterns drawn from natural, geometric, celestial, and astronomical sources which Wordsworth and Coleridge used to express their ideas about poetry, religion, literary criticism, and philosophy. It establishes the central important of analogy in their creative thinking. Analogies prompted the poets’ imaginings in geometry and cartography, in nature (representations of the Moon) and natural history (studies of spider-webs, streams, and dew), in calculus and conical refraction, and in the discovery of infra-red and ultraviolet light. Although this is primarily a study of the patterns which inspired their writing, the findings overturn the prevalent critical consensus that Wordsworth and Coleridge did not have the access, interest, or capacity to understand the latest developments in nineteenth-century astronomy and mathematics, which they did in fact possess. This research reinstates many relationships which the poets had with scientists and their sources. Most significantly, the book illustrates that these sources are not simply another context or historical lens through which to engage with Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s work but are instead a controlling device of the symbolic imagination. Exploring the structures behind Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poems and metaphysics stakes out a return to the evidence of the Romantic imagination, not for its own sake, but in order to reveal that their analogical configuration of the world provided them with a scaffold for thinking, an intellectual orrery which ordered artistic consciousness and which they never abandoned.