William Blake as natural philosopher, 1788-1795 / Joseph Fletcher.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fletcher, Joseph, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Blake, William, 1757-1827--Philosophy.

Blake, William.

Pantheism.

Monism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (264 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

London : Anthem Press, 2022.

Summary:

<i>William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 takes seriously William Blake's wish to be read as a natural philosopher, particularly in his early illuminated works, and reveals the way that poetry and visual art were for Blake an imaginative way of philosophizing. Blake's poetry and designs reveal a consistent preoccupation with eighteenth-century natural philosophical debates concerning the properties of the physical world, the nature of the soul, and God's relationship to the material universe. This book traces the history of these debates and examines images and ideas in Blake's illuminated books that mark the development of the monist pantheism, which contends that every material thing is in its essence God, to the idealism of his later period, which casts the natural world as degenerate and illusory. The book argues that Blake's philosophical thought was not as monolithic as has been previously characterized, and that pantheism is important to understanding his early works because it entails an ethics that respects the interconnected divinity of all material objects - not just humans - which in turn spurns hierarchical power structures.

Contents:

Cover

Front Matter

Half-title

Title page

Copyright information

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Chapters Int-coda

Introduction: "We Who Are Philosophers": Blake's Early Metaphysics

Chapter One A Sense of the Infinite: Leibniz, Hume and Panpsychism in the Early Tractates

The Case against Berkeley

Locke's Metaphysics

Locke and Leibniz on the Infinite

Hume and Blake against Natural Religion

Philosophical Designs

Chapter Two Soul Matter: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Monist Pantheism

The Soul in Classical Philosophy

Plato's Ambiguous Dualism

Aristotle's Three Souls

The Stoics and Epicureans on the Soul's Materiality

Neoplatonic Anima

The Soul in Early Modern Philosophy

Paracelsus, Spinoza and Early Modern Pantheism

Materialism in Hobbes and Bacon

Descartes's Unambiguous Dualism

Newton, Locke and the Roots of Eighteenth-Century Deism

The Contested Soul in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy

Priestley's "Immaterial Materialism"

Priestley vs. Swedenborg

Imagination over Empiricism

From the Early Tractates to The Marriage

Chapter Three Breathing Dust: Erasmus Darwin and Blake's Regenerative Materialism

The Botanic Garden and the "Transmigrating Ens"

The Book of Thel and the "Land Unknown"

Europe and the "Finite Wall of Flesh"

The Song of Los and Dualism's Dead Sun

Chapter Four "Horrible Forms of Deformity": The Urizen Cycle and Vitalist Materialism

Urizen's Divisive Desire and "Activity Unknown"

Urizen's Newtonian "Globes of Attraction"

The "Red Globe of Life Blood" and Blake's Embryology

A Polypus Appears

Remembering Eternity

Coda: The Ghost of Pantheism

End Matter

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 22 Feb 2022).

ISBN:

9781785279522

1785279521

9781785279539

178527953X

OCLC:

1491307815