Humanities & Philosophy

Caught up in a revolutionary zeitgeist, William Blake composed The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in 1790. Part of the swirling radicalism purported that some version of the Biblical concept of millennium was immanent, whether it be secular or sacred in nature. Blake infuses his work with this concern for millennialist thought through the themes of temporality and eternity. The debate in millennialist circles concerning how the millennium would occur privileged either communal human agency or individual divine/prophetic intervention. Though Blake begins his work by refuting the prophetic figure of Swedenborg and advocating for the collectivist approach occurring temporally, his developing aesthetic lens leads to the embracement of both modes of action. In a contrariety true to his ethos expressed in The Marriage, Blake’s paradigm for reform evolves to include a poet-prophet figure operating to incite and model a collectivist human revolution that will actuate the millennium.

In Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown attempted to negotiate varying forces confronting contemporary American religious and political life. Through the transformation of the temple into a Gothic zone Brown injects questions of epis-temological uncertainty, clashing forces of rational Enlightenment and supernatural faith. Brown outlines the religiously motivated founding of the nation reacting to European oppression as allegorical to the Wieland patriarch's journey from the Old to New World, and his construction of the temple demonstrates the establishment of new institutions in the American landscape. Religious liberty turns into ex-tremism, producing Gothic violence that transforms the temple into a site of horror and destruction. His children attempt to re-transform the temple along rational Enlightenment lines much the same as Brown perceived the need for America to distance itself from its revolutionary and religious extremist origins. Yet the failure of rationalism to expunge the supernatural aura from the temple allows for the tragic events to transpire that comprise the bulk of the novel. Ultimately, Brown's Gothic novel evinces the critical nature of the epistemological clash he sees taking place for the direction America will take, and his concerns that Gothic violence will reverberate throughout future generations find their expression in Wieland's temple. Using literature to translate or interpret history is common practice for a good reason: usually literature sheds an alternate light upon the context that produced it. The Gothic genre as it developed in American literature particularly facilitates this use. Teresa Goddu explains that 'the Gothic is a historical mode, intensely engaged with its culture's concerns. Instead of being an escapist genre, it registers its culture's contradictions, presenting a distorted, not a disengaged, version of reality'. Goddu

Among the challenges confronting ecocriticism and environmental activism in modern times is a marked indifference to the crisis itself, an indifference that stems from an egocentric attitude that pervades much of the Western world. Efforts to raise awareness and concern for environmental crises must begin by addressing this lassitude or apathy before a groundswell of sentiment can affect political and social change. Poetry contains a unique ability to generate the individual transformation necessary to reconnect with communities as well as the environmental. As the Romantic poet of nature William Wordsworth pursued such a transformation in his poetry that reflected his environmental as well as aesthetic sensibilities, both in his celebrated early works and in later projects. His use of liturgical structures in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets presents a poetic potential for catalyzing the transformation necessary, a transformation not directed toward religious ends but to incite an appreciation and preservation of the natural world that so inspired him.

William Blake’s The Songs of Innocence and of Experience employed catechistic structures frequently found in eighteenth-century children’s literature; however, this appropriation by Blake provokes questions about his political and aesthetic agenda. Children’s literature, though increasingly popular throughout the eighteenth century, was not a vehicle for serious art and commentary. Likewise, catechisms, both in religious texts like the Book of Common Prayer and in children’s books by writers like Bunyan, Isaac Watts, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, supported religious and civil hierarchies that Blake rejected. Yet the participatory nature of catechesis provided Blake the opportunity to unveil his own political-aesthetic program for revolution and redemption. Through the contraries of image and word in “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” Blake encourages readers to participate in the creative process, to become artists. The catechistic poems celebrate children’s connection to the imagination and attempt to reeducate adults from their indoctrinated obedience to Church and State.

In Christabel Coleridge attempts, consciously or subconsciously, to derive inspiration from the numinous narratives of the past and from the revolutionary transgression of the present. The poem’s references to medieval romance both celebrates and critiques English heritage and its cultural institutions, and simultaneously weaves in pagan and folkloric elements that harken back to the pre-Roman druidic culture to inject mysterious and supernatural elements into the work. Concurrent with this historic homage Coleridge sought to infuse transgressive inversions of class, gender roles, sexuality, and political order to participate in the revolutionary zeitgeist of his day. The vampire figure with its blend of archaic mysticism and subversive defiance provided a vehicle for his aesthetic experimentation, and Coleridge inadvertently created a proto-vampire poem that inspired nineteenth century gothic and vampire narratives. However, the very transgressive energy of revolutionary upheaval that Coleridge found inspiring betrayed him and ultimately stifled his creative production. This aesthetic muzzling and Coleridge’s recognition of it contributes to his inability to bring Christabel to completion, and even explains the precipitous decline in both quality and creative energy from Part I to Part II of the existing manuscript. Coleridge provides a crucial early example of the creative potency inherent in tales of vampiric transgression that resonated throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, though his incapacity to reconcile transgressive energy with archaic mysticism illustrates the anxiety involved in fin-de-siècle narratives, an anxiety incidentally that is as much part of the heritage of vampire novels as the vampire itself.

William Blake’s The Songs of Innocence and of Experience employed catechistic structures frequently found in eighteenth-century children’s literature; however, this appropriation by Blake provokes questions about his political and aesthetic agenda. Children’s literature, though increasingly popular throughout the eighteenth century, was not a vehicle for serious art and commentary. Likewise, catechisms, both in religious texts like the Book of Common Prayer and in children’s books by writers like Bunyan, Isaac Watts, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, supported religious and civil hierarchies that Blake rejected. Yet the participatory nature of catechesis provided Blake the opportunity to unveil his own political-aesthetic program for revolution and redemption. Through the contraries of image and word in “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” Blake encourages readers to participate in the creative process, to become artists. The catechistic poems celebrate children’s connection to the imagination and attempt to reeducate adults from their indoctrinated obedience to Church and State.

Many recent commentators, most notably Richard Bett, have made Pyrrho out to be a metaphysical dogmatist who thinks the world is fundamentally indeterminate. Despite some criticisms of this view by Brennan and others, this metaphysical reading has continued to gain adherents. But there are serious textual and logical problems with these dogmatic interpretations. According to the evidence we have, a better view is that Pyrrho was an agnostic skeptic, i.e. one who refused to make assertions about the world outside of perceptual or intellectual appearances. But this does not mean that the traditional view of Pyrrho is correct either: the kind of skepticism Pyrrho endorsed is not Pyrrhonian, because it is grounded in the nature of our epistemic faculties rather than opposition between equally plausible theories, arguments, beliefs, or appearances. A secondary thesis of this paper is about methodology. Rather than focus on the most ambiguous and contentious passages in isolation, we should base our interpretation on the whole corpus, beginning with the easiest passages. Faulty interpretations of Pyrrho go wrong, I argue, partly by failing to follow this method.

In Plato’s Symposium Eryximachus provides a metaphysical theory based on the attraction of basic elements which he applies to a variety of domains, including music. In the text of his speech there is a variation in the manuscripts at 187d2 between two readings, “μέλεσί τε καὶ μέτροις” and “μέλεσί τε καὶ ῥυθμοῖς”. Though the former is almost universally followed, I argue that the latter is the correct reading. The manuscript transmission does not support either option over the other, but Plato’s style and diction, and the logic of the passage both suggest that ῥυθμοῖς is the preferable reading.

This paper argues that Aristotle's Metaphysics Z.3 deploys a reductio against the claim that 'substances underlie by being the subjects of predication' , in order to demonstrate the need for a new explanation of how substances underlie. Z.13 and H.1 corroborate this reading: both allude to an argument originally contained in Z.3, but now lost from our text, that form, matter and compound 'underlie' in different ways. This helps explain some of Z's peculiarities—and it avoids committing Aristotle to self-contradiction about whether matter is substance, a claim denied in the reductio but endorsed elsewhere.

This paper presents a small set of terra sigillata Italica recovered during the excavation of Caladinho (Redondo, Portugal) between 2010 and 2013. This assemblage suggests a short occupation for this small, fortified watchtower meant to provide surveillance over the surrounding landscape. This set of imports permits us to place the occupation of this tower in the last quarter of the 1st century B.C.E., coinciding with the colonization and pacification of this region by the Romans.