The Relevance of Romanticism

Since the early 1990s, there has been a resurgence of interest in philosophy between Kant and Hegel, and in early German romanticism in particular. Philosophers have come to recognize that, in spite of significant differences between the contemporary and romantic contexts, romanticism continues to persist, and the questions which the romantics raised remain relevant today. The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on Early German Romantic Philosophy is the first collection of essays that offers an in-depth analysis of the reasons why philosophers are (and should be) concerned with romanticism. Through historical and systematic reconstructions, the collection offers a deeper understanding and more encompassing picture of romanticism as a philosophical movement than has been presented thus far, and explicates the role that romanticism plays -- or can play -- in contemporary philosophical debates.
The volume includes essays by a number of preeminent international scholars and philosophers -- Karl Ameriks, Frederick Beiser, Richard Eldridge, Michael Forster, Manfred Frank, Jane Kneller, and Paul Redding -- who discuss the nature of philosophical romanticism and its potential to address contemporary questions and concerns. Through contributions from established and emerging philosophers, discussing key romantic themes and concerns, the volume highlights the diversity both within romantic thought and its contemporary reception. Part One consists of the first published encounter between Manfred Frank and Frederick Beiser, in which the two major scholars directly discuss their vastly differing interpretations of philosophical romanticism. Part Two draws significant connections between romantic conceptions of history, sociability, hermeneutics and education and explores the ways in which these views can illuminate pressing questions in contemporary social-political philosophy and theories of interpretation. Part Three consists in some of the most innovative takes on romantic aesthetics, which seek to bring romantic thought into dialogue, with, for instance, contemporary Analytic aesthetics and theories of cognition/mind. The final part offers one of the few rigorous engagements with romantic conceptions science, and demonstrates ways in which the romantic views of nature, scientific experimentation and mathematics need not be relegated to historical curiosities.

Dalia Nassar is a research fellow of the Australian Research Council (ARC) in the philosophy department at the University of Sydney and assistant professor of philosophy at Villanova University. She is the author of The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy 1795-1804 (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part 1. German Romanticism as a Philosophical Movement
- Chapter 1. Manfred Frank, What is Early German Romantic Philosophy?
- Chapter 2. Frederick Beiser, Romanticism and Idealism
- Part 2. History, Hermeneutics and Sociability
- Chapter 3. Karl Ameriks, History and German Romanticism
- Chapter 4. Michael N. Forster, Romanticism and Language
- Chapter 5. Kristin Gjesdal, Hermeneutics, Individuality, and Tradition: Schleiermacher's Idea of Bildung in the Landscape of Hegelian Thought
- Chapter 6. Jane Kneller, Sociability and the Conduct of Philosophy: What philosophers can learn from early German Romanticism
- Part 3. Literature, Art and Mythology
- Chapter 7. Richard Eldridge,"Doch sehnend stehst /Am Ufer du"("But longing you stand on the shore"): Hölderlin, Philosophy, Subjectivity, and Finitude
- Chapter 8. Brady Bowman, On the Defense of Literary Value: From Early German Romanticism to Analytic Philosophy of Literature
- Chapter 9. Keren Gorodeisky, "No Poetry, No Reality": Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Fiction and Reality
- Chapter 10. Laure Cahen-Maurel, "A Simple Wheat Field": A New Picturing of the Sublime in Caspar David Friedrich
- Chapter 11. Bruce Matthews, The New Mythology: Romanticism Between Religion and Humanism
- Part 4. Science and Nature
- Chapter 12. Paul Redding, Mathematics, Computation, Language and Poetry: The Novalis Paradox
- Chapter 13. John H. Smith, The Romantic Calculus: Infinity, Continuity, Infinitesimal
- Chapter 14. David W. Wood, The Wissenschaftslehre as Mathematics: On a Late Fichtean Reflection of Novalis
- Chapter 15. Amanda Jo Goldstein, Irritable Figures: Romantic Philosophy of Science by way of Johann Gottfried Herder
- Chapter 16. Dalia Nassar, Romantic Empiricism after the 'End of Nature': Contributions to Environmental Philosophy