Knowledge and Indifference

What is it about?

This study sheds new light on the way the English Romantics dealt with the basic problems of knowledge.

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Why is it important?

Kant complained that the failure of philosophy in the eighteenth-century to respond to empirical scepticism had produced a culture of "indifferentism." Tim Milnes explores the tension between this epistemic indifference and a perpetual compulsion to know. He argues that this tension is most clearly evident in the prose writing of the period, in works such as Wordsworth's 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads, Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action, and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.