Matter and Life in Coleridge, Schelling, and Other Dynamical Idealists

This book, written by renowned historians of philosophy, literature, and science, provides a distinctively interdisciplinary work on matter and life in early-modern Germany and Britain (1600–1850). It interrelates key theories of matter and the life sciences from Jakob Böhme, Ralph Cudworth, G. W. Leibniz, Anthony Cooper (Shaftesbury), Immanuel Kant, J. W. Goethe, Novalis, Friedrich Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, S. T. Coleridge, and Arthur Schopenhauer. Schelling’s centrality in the philosophy of nature is highlighted but also Coleridge’s role in importing and adapting German philosophical and scientific insights into the domain of British science runs through the book. At the core of this original project is an interrelated and interdependent analysis of Cambridge Platonism, German idealism, and British romanticism. Under the umbrella term of ‘dynamical idealists’, the editor of the volume refers to investigators of the vital energy of nature who characteristically combined the tradition of early-modern speculative idealism with enquiries into an experiential study of nature involving mysticism, chemistry, and empirical accounts of physical matter. Significantly, several chapters concentrate on the relationships between human will, agency, freedom, and God, shedding light on modern conceptions of subjectivity and selfhood. All of the above makes this book of great value to historians of philosophy, literature, and science.

Chapter 1. Introduction to Dynamical Idealists on Matter and Life (Cheyne).- Part 1. Chapter 2. ‘Wonderfully did this gifted Seer fly before his Age’: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jacob Böhme, and Naturphilosophie (Muratori and Vigus).- Chapter 3. Coleridge on Leibniz, Continuity, and the Hidden Life of the Self (Ketz).- Chapter 4. Plastic Nature from Cudworth to Shaftesbury and German Classical Idealist Philosophy (Wormald).- Chapter 5. Novalis’s Poetic Understanding of Nature in the Age of Romanticism (Hampton).- Part 2. Chapter 6. Mind and Matter in Hegel and Schelling (Rajan).- Chapter 7. Grasping a Living Nature: Schelling, Goethe and the Roots of Process Philosophy (Höfele).- Chapter 8. Schelling’s Principle of Life and the Unity of Mind and Nature (Ostaric).- Chapter 9. Living and Dead Forms: The Factuality of Meaning in Schelling and Other Naturalists (Whistler).- Chapter 10. Schelling and Coleridge’s Theories of Matter (Snow).- Chapter 11. The Ordure of Things: Coleridge, Schelling, and the Indivisible Remainder (Milnes).- Part 3. Chapter 12. The Limits of Analogy in Coleridge’s Philosophy of Nature (Azadpour).- Chapter 13. An ‘Alphabet of the Philosophy of physical Dynamics’: Coleridge’s Theory of the Metaphysical Foundations of Matter (Struwig).- Chapter 14. Coleridge and the Science of Life (Cooper).- Chapter 15. Bloody Speck: How S. T. Coleridge Turned the Embryological Punctum Saliens into a Metaphysical Principle (Cheyne).- Chapter 16. Matter, Will, and Human Life in Coleridge and Schopenhauer (Dushane).- Chapter 17. Life, Nature, and Race: Blumenbach’s Vital Materialism in Coleridge’s Later Writings (1818–28) (Page-Jones).- Chapter 18. Coleridge and Human Individuation: The Passions (Timár).- Chapter 19. Coleridge’s Poem ‘Human Life Contemplated on the Denial of Immortality’ (1811–15) (Mays).

Peter Cheyne is professor in British literature and culture, Shimane University, Japan, visiting fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and visiting fellow in philosophy, University of Durham. He is the author of Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2020), editor of Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life (Routledge, 2023) and Coleridge and Contemplation (Oxford UP, 2017) and co-editor of The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford UP, 2020).