English Language and Literature Commons^™

Accepting The Romantics As Philosophers, Michael Fischer

English Faculty Research

The Romantics are not widely regarded as philosophers, at least not in philosophy departments, where they are seldom taught. Some of the reasons behind this exclusion of the Romantics involve a general disdain for literature; other reasons suggest a more specific uneasiness with Romanticism itself—with its apparent interest in animism, its self-indulgence, its coolness toward reason, and, perhaps above all, its refusal to abide by Kant's containment of skepticism. These complaints are not the invention of paranoid or obtuse academic philosophers (as some literary critics might like to think). In fact, some of these objections have dogged the Romantics from …