Romanticism, Scientism, and the Lost Art of Philosophy

Date and Time

October 17, 2024
06:00PM - 06:00PM EDT

Location

Barker Center, Room 133

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

SPEAKER: Nancy Yousef, Rutgers University

The relationship between philosophy and literature that Romantic poets and thinkers took for granted, and that was sustained in later 19th c. intellectual culture, came to be rejected in the early decades of the twentieth century by a scientifically committed philosophical vanguard. Postwar developments in Anglo-American philosophy have the driven the field ever more decisively out of alignment with the humanistic disciplines. This talk asks what the enterprise of literary studies might still share with philosophy—and how Romanticism can help us recover a sense of their entwined history, common language, and shared imaginative aspirations.

About the Speaker

Nancy Yousef is Distinguished Professor of English in the Department of English at Rutgers University.

Co-sponsored by Dialectical Thinking in the Humanities.