| Description |
1 online resource (244 pages) : illustrations |
| Contents |
The ghost of David Hume : backgrounds to mid-Victorian empiricism -- Ruskin's Modern painters and the visual language of reality -- The eye (in)exact : G.H. Lewes and the problems of perception -- As deep as the viscera : Alexander Bain, Spinoza, and the knowing body -- To think is to condition : Herbert Spencer and the negotiations of relativism -- Epilogue : rethinking empiricism |
| Summary |
Dr. Garratt argues that by the 1860s empiricism was both a dominant cultural language and a reflexive epistemic theory, producing a model of contingent selfhood conceived simultaneously as the route towards knowledge and its obstacle. For this reason, Victorian empiricism predicated its search for knowledge on a profound instability, one embodied within the textual language through which it sought its articulation. By examining familiar works, such as Ruskin's Modern Painters and George Eliot's fiction, alongside the voluminous psychological and philosophical prose of Bain, Lewes, and Spencer, he illustrates, using detailed examples, how the imperatives of empiricist thought shaped the aesthetic of realism, as well as nineteenth-century views towards perception, human embodiment, and relativism. In all cases, their works give shape to empiricism's skeptical impulse. In Ruskin, for example, the narrative journey into knowledge is one of haphazard progress and fraught autobiographical engagement; in Bain's psychology it forms a story of precarious accumulation; in Lewes and Spencer, sprawling form expresses the proliferating potential of knowledge itself. George Eliot's novels are read as interventions in, as well as commentaries on, this pre-disciplinary discourse, which emerges from the British philosophical tradition while being transformed by intellectual developments in evolutionary theory and nervous physiology. Victorian Empiricism will therefore appeal to students and researchers working in literary studies, history of science, and nineteenth-century interdisciplinary cultural history |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Empiricism -- History -- 19th century
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HISTORY.
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Europe / Great Britain.
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Empiricism
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Intellectual life
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Philosophy & Religion.
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Philosophy.
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| SUBJECT |
Great Britain -- Intellectual life -- 19th century.
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85056856
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| Subject |
Great Britain
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| Genre/Form |
History
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| LC no. |
2010002542 |
| ISBN |
083864287X |
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9780838642870 |
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0838642667 |
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9780838642665 |
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