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How do minds cause events in the world? How does wanting to write a letter cause a person's hands to move across the page, or believing something to be true cause a person to make a promise? In Actions and Objects, Jonathan Kramnick examines the literature and philosophy of action during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when philosophers and novelists, poets and scientists were all concerned with the place of the mind in the world. These writers asked whether belief, desire, and emotion were part of nature—and thus subject to laws of cause and effect—or in a special place outside the natural order. Kramnick puts particular emphasis on those who tried to make actions compatible with external determination and to blur the boundary between mind and matter. He follows a long tradition of examining the close relation between literary and philosophical writing during the period, but fundamentally revises the terrain. Rather than emphasizing psychological depth and interiority or asking how literary works were understood as true or fictional, he situates literature alongside philosophy as jointly interested in discovering how minds work.
Price: $140.00
Pages: 320
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Imprint: Stanford University Press
Publication Date:
30 August 2010
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780804770514
Format: Hardcover
"As a philosopher and cognitive scientist, I read Jonathan Kramnick's book Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson with mounting excitement. He makes a compelling case that Rochester's late-seventeenth-century erotic poetry—on such topics as unwelcome episodes of impotence or random sexual encounters in London's public parks—can and should be read as making innovative contributions to then flourishing debates about the nature of mind, the person and agency. What's more, Kramnick shows that these earlier debates continue to shape our engagement today with these same topics. If Kramnick is right, then contemporary philosophy of mind needs to take a new look at these old literatures. But there is a more far-reaching upshot: Kramnick describes a world where there were no sharp lines to be drawn between the work of theory and the work of the literary artist. Perhaps this too ought to serve as a model for us today? Maybe it is time for us to bridge the gap that separates the concerns and methods of science and those of literature in contemporary society. Kramnick's book is more than intellectual history. It actively engages with these important issues."
Jonathan Kramnick is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University and author of Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past 1700–1770 (1999).