Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy

'PHILOSOPHY or the doctrine and discipline of ideas' as S. T. Coleridge understood it is the theme of this book. It considers the most vital and mature vein of Coleridge's thought to be 'the contemplation of ideas objectively as existing powers'. A theory of ideas emerges in critical engagement with thinkers including Plato Plotinus B�hme Kant and Schelling. A commitment to the transcendence of reason central to what he calls 'the spiritual platonic old England' distinguishes him from his German contemporaries. The book also engages with Coleridge's poetry especially in a culminating chapter dedicated to the 'Limbo' sequence. <p/>This book pursues a theory of contemplation that draws from Coleridge's theories of imagination and the 'Ideas of Reason' in his published texts and extensively from his thoughts as they developed throughout unpublished works fragments letters and notebooks. He posited a hierarchy of cognition from basic sense intuition to the apprehension of scientific ethical and theological ideas. The structure of the book follows this thesis beginning with sense data moving upwards into aesthetic experience imagination and reason with final chapters on formal logic and poetry that constellate the contemplation of ideas. <p/><em>Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy</em> is not just a work of history of philosophy it addresses a figure whose thinking is of continuing interest arguing that contemplation of ideas and values has consequences for everyday morality and aesthetics as well as metaphysics. The volume will be of interest to philosophers intellectual historians scholars of religion and of literature. <p/>