Attracting philosophers, politicians, artists as well as the educated reader, Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, first published in 1757, was a milestone in western thinking. This edited volume will take the 250th anniversary of the Philosophical Enquiry as an occasion to reassess Burke’s prominence in the history of ideas. Situated on the threshold between early modern philosophy and the Enlightenment, Burke’s oeuvre combines reflections on aesthetics, politics and the sciences. This collection is the first book length work devoted primarily to Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry in both its historical context and for its contemporary relevance. It will establish the fact that the Enquiry is an important philosophical and literary work in its own right.

In his Enquiry Edmund Burke overturned the Platonic tradition in aesthetics and replaced metaphysics with psychology. His revolutions in method and sensibility influenced later philosophers and literary and artistic movements from the Gothic novel to Romanticism and beyond. This new edition guides the reader through Burke's arguments.

This volume reconstructs the body of sensibility and the discourse which constructed it. The discourse of sensibility was deployed very widely throughout the mid- to late-eighteenth century, particularly in France and Britain. To inquire into the body of sensibility is then necessarily to enter into an interdisciplinary space and so to invite the plurality of methodological approaches which this collection exemplifies. The chapters collected here draw together the histories of literature and aesthetics, metaphysics and epistemology, moral theory, medicine, and cultural history. Together, they contribute to four major themes: First, the collection reconstructs various modes by which the sympathetic subject was construed or scripted, including through the theatre, poetry, literature, and medical and philosophical treaties. It secondly draws out those techniques of affective pedagogy which were implied by the medicalisation of the knowing body, and thirdly highlights the manner in which the body of sensibility was constructed as simultaneously particular and universal. Finally, it illustrates the ‘centrifugal forces’ at play within the discourse, and the anxiety which often accompanied them. At the centre of eighteenth-century thought was a very particular object: the body of sensibility, the Enlightenment’s knowing body. The persona of the knowledge-seeker was constructed by drawing together mind and matter, thought and feeling. And so where the Enlightenment thinker is generally associated with reason, truth-telling, and social and political reform, the Enlightenment is also known for its valorisation of emotion. During the period, intellectual pursuits were envisioned as having a distinctly embodied and emotional aspect. The body of ‘sensibility’ encompassed these apparently disparate strands and was associated with terms including ‘sentimental’, ‘sentiment’, ‘sense’, ‘sensation’, and ‘sympathy’.

Over the last fifty years the life and work of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) has received sustained scholarly attention and debate. The publication of the complete correspondence in ten volumes and the nine volume edition of Burke's Writings and Speeches have provided material for the scholarly reassessment of his life and works. Attention has focused in particular on locating his ideas in the history of eighteenth-century theory and practice and the contexts of late eighteenth-century conservative thought. This book broadens the focus to examine the many sided interest in Burke's ideas primarily in Europe, and most notably in politics and aesthetics. It draws on the work of leading international scholars to present new perspectives on the significance of Burke's ideas in European politics and culture.

This book provides a comprehensive survey of Edmund Burke's historical thought, a neglected area of both Burke scholarship and historiography. Ranging from Burke's general conception of history to his accounts of English, European, American, Irish and Asian-Muslim history, this book offers much-needed depth and context to his political life. Sora Sato illuminates Burke's ideas on civilisation and world order with careful analysis of both his well-known historical concepts, such as the ancient constitution of England and the spirit of chivalry, as well as his lesser-known opinions on war and the military. Written with clarity and precision, this book is an invaluable reference for scholars of Burke, early modern European history and political philosophy.

This book examines the links between the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain and eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in particular, is shown to have directly or indirectly challenged visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and visual media such as panoramas and book illustrations, by arguing that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork.

This book substantiates two claims. First, the modern world was not simply produced by "objective" factors, rooted in geographical discoveries and scientific inventions, to be traced to economic, technological or political factors, but is the outcome of social, cultural and spiritual processes. Among such factors, beyond the Protestant ethic (Max Weber), the rise of the absolutist state and its disciplinary network (Michel Foucault), or court society (Norbert Elias), a prime role is played by theatre. The modern reality is deeply theatricalized. Second, a special access for studying this theatricalized world is offered by novels. The best classical novels not simply can be interpreted as describing a world "like" the theatre, but they capture and present a world that has become thoroughly transformed into a global theatre. The theatre effectively transformed the world, and classical novels effectively analyze this "theatricalized" reality – much better than the main instruments supposedly destined to study reality, philosophy and sociology. Thus, instead of using the technique of sociology to analyze novels, the book will treat novels as a "royal road" to analyze a theatricalized reality, in order to find our way back to a genuine and meaningful life.

No author in the English canon seems more deserving of the epithet sublime than John Milton. Yet Milton's sublimity has long been dismissed as an invention of eighteenth-century criticism. The poet himself, the story goes, could hardly have had any notion of the sublime, a concept that only took shape in the decades after his death with the advent of philosophical aesthetics. Such a narrative, however, fails to account for the fact that Milton is one of the first writers in English to refer to Longinus, the author traditionally associated with the Ancient Greek treatise On the Sublime. This book argues that Milton did have an idea of the sublime--one that came to him from Longinus but also from a larger classical tradition that offered a pre-aesthetic predecessor to the aesthetic concept of the sublime. Thomas Vozar shows that Longinus was better known in early modern England than has been previously appreciated; that various notions of sublimity beyond that of Longinus would have been available to Milton and his contemporaries; and that such notions of the sublime were integral to Milton's rhetorical, scientific, and theological imagination. Additional material relating to the early modern reception of Longinus is provided in the appendices, which contain the first bibliographical study of copies of Longinus in English private libraries to 1674 and an edition of a newly discovered seventeenth-century English translation of Longinus. Far from being anachronistic, Milton's "abstracted sublimities" touch on almost every aspect of his thought, from rhetoric to politics, from science to theology. Making substantive contributions to literary scholarship, classical reception studies, and the history of ideas, Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century returns the sublime to its proper place at the forefront of Milton criticism, re-evaluates the diffusion of Longinian texts and concepts in early modern Europe, and records a crucial missing chapter in the history of the sublime.

A fascinating journey through the origins of American tourism In the early nineteenth century, thanks to a booming transportation industry, Americans began to journey away from home simply for the sake of traveling, giving rise to a new cultural phenomenon —the tourist. In Selling the Sights, Will B. Mackintosh describes the origins and cultural significance of this new type of traveler and the moment in time when the emerging American market economy began to reshape the availability of geographical knowledge, the material conditions of travel, and the variety of destinations that sought to profit from visitors with money to spend. Entrepreneurs began to transform the critical steps of travel—deciding where to go and how to get there—into commodities that could be produced in volume and sold to a marketplace of consumers. The identities of Americans prosperous enough to afford such commodities were fundamentally changed as they came to define themselves through the consumption of experiences. Mackintosh ultimately demonstrates that the cultural values and market forces surrounding tourism in the early nineteenth century continue to shape our experience of travel to this day.

This book examines the influence of Hume, Reid, Smith, Hutcheson, and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers on Kant’s philosophy. It begins with the influence of these thinkers on Kant, then moves to an examination of the relationship between truth, freedom, and responsibility and its connection to Kant’s metaphysics and aesthetics.