This chapter argues that Byron is famous as a leading figure in Romantic poetry, but his own allegiance was to eighteenth-century culture. I argue that on the one hand he confirms the distinction between the two and yet he also overturns it. This is because he enters so deeply into the contradictions and character of eighteenth-century culture that he is part of their generation of something different. In this he resembles Burke’s deep relation to Whig culture and Newman’s to the Church of England, both of whom by this brought about the transformation of what they revered into something new and yet sourced in the past. I argue that is bound up with a larger historical transition between judging actions as open possibilities and accepting behaviour as an unalterable given. Byron is, as he claimed to be, an ethical poet because his attention is primarily to the former of these.

Chapter Three pursues the discussion of aesthetics broached in the previous chapter, focussing on the aesthetic experience most often associated with Romanticism: the Sublime. Contrasting the influential histories of Samuel Holt Monk and Marjorie Nicholson, it argues that no single theory of the sublime dominated the eighteenth century, and that Kant’s influential ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ does not exhaust the term’s many historical meanings, which included the rhetorical sublime, the natural sublime, and the philosophical sublime. The chapter addresses the sublime in a variety of discourses and practices, including landscape gardening, astronomy, gothic fiction, revolutionary politics, language theory and antiquarian texts such as Ossian and the Scandinavian Veddas. It then distinguishes between Burke’s physiological, Kant’s cognitive, Schiller’s moral, and Herder’s more ‘naturalised’ versions of the philosophical sublime, before looking at the rhetorical sublime in Longinus and eighteenth-century language theories, and finally at the natural sublime in landscape aesthetics and in the poetry of Wordsworth, Leopardi, and Mickiewicz. It concludes that academic reconstructions of the Romantic sublime based on Kant have skewed the history of the concept, in particular by legitimating models of Romantic individuality that have excluded women.

When Weber insists that scholars must choose between Stories, he is promoting what he calls an ethics of responsibility. Nowadays, liberal scholars are hard pressed to make such choices, because they do not share Stories of their own. They are humanists but, unlike the Founders, they are not united by commitment to, for example, a framework of natural law principles. In these circumstances, Judith Shklar proposed that instead of favoring a particular Story, liberals should make common cause by opposing instances of cruelty and tyranny. In this sense, they should be “philosophes” rather than philosophers.

This chapter shows how, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Norse gods and the Scandinavian Viking were reimagined and refashioned in poetry, visual art, and music drama in accordance with Burke’s ideas of the sublime. Coinciding temporally with Burke’s Enquiry, the revival of interest in Old Norse and medieval Scandinavian poetry furnished poets and artists with a new mythology as an alternative to classical Greek and Roman mythology. This chapter argues that the aesthetics of the sublime, as a challenge to neoclassical standards, encouraged an expansion of the poetical canon, allowing for the inclusion of ancient Scandinavian poetry, which the previous generation had scorned as rough and barbaric, and furthermore provided a new verbal and visual idiom in which this poetry could be recreated for a contemporary audience.

Surprisingly, radio observations of the planets also turned up unexpected discoveries. While testing their transit radio array using the Crab Nebula as a reference source, two scientists at the Carnegie Institution Department of Terrestrial Magnetism noticed a strange variable signal that repeated each night. First suspecting that it was ignition noise from a nearby farm vehicle, they later realized that they were detecting radio emission from powerful electrical storms on Jupiter, which was at the same declination as the Crab Nebula as it passed through their fixed telescope beam. Mercury, long thought to have one side bathed in eternal daylight, was found to be rotating. Radio observations revealed the greenhouse effect on Venus, causing surface temperatures to reach over 600 degrees Celsius, and detected intense radiation belts around Jupiter, analogous to the Earth’s van Allen belts. The other giant planets were all found to be warmer than can be explained by solar heating alone. Precise pulsar timing measurements disclosed the first known extrasolar planetary system, a precursor to the thousands of extrasolar planets later discovered by ground and space based optical studies.

The campus of Trinity College Dublin is a paradox; on the one hand, it is a enclosed campus, cut off from the city around it by walls and gates; on the other, it is situated in the very heart of the city. Among its graduates are many of Ireland’s major writers, from George Farquhar in the seventeenth century, to Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith in the eighteenth century, to Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde in the nineteenth century, and J. M. Synge in the early twentieth century. In the 1960s, many of the poets who would dominate Irish poetry in the decades that followed were students or staff: Eavan Boland, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanéin, Brendan Kennelly, and Paula Meehan. More recently, novelists Anne Enright and Sally Rooney have been graduates. This chapter looks at how over the centuries, the distinctive nature of Trinity’s space within the city – both enclosed and yet permeable – has provided a kind of oasis for conversation and writing, while still actively engaging with the life of the city around it.

Chapter 3 examines adherent beauty or partly conceptual beauty. How are beauty and the good related? Like Johann Georg Sulzer and David Hume, Kant distinguishes between free beauty and purpose-based beauty, or the kind grounded in the purposes or aims of the object or artwork. Even in his early aesthetics, Kant holds that beauty and goodness are distinct concepts yet can be conjoined. Purpose-based beauty is central to Kant’s early aesthetics, and he calls it “self-standing.” This kind of beauty is retained in the third Critique in the form of adherent beauty, yet a fundamental shift occurs: he there calls free beauty “self-standing.”

Chapter 6 characterizes the development of Kant’s views of the sublime in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and other pre-Critical writings and materials. The description of the sublime in the third Critique is shaped by Kant’s moral turn and his interest in a principle of natural purposiveness. The chapter shows how the early Kant synthesizes the ideas of Edmund Burke on the one hand and Alexander Baumgarten and Moses Mendelssohn on the other. It reveals how Kant shifts from a psychological–anthropological account of the sublime to a non-empirical, transcendental one.

Prompted by what he perceived as the chaotic tendencies of the Jacobins, Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, proposes a modern revival of honor, a virtue derived from the time-tested principles of chivalry, hierarchy, and, above all, the shared sentiments that bound together the social order. William Godwin’s preeminent Jacobin novel Caleb Williams represents one outcome of living under Burkes sentimentalist honor code: its relentlessly skeptical protagonist is cowed by the emotional demands of chivalry and is ultimately left unable to think about anything but his master, with whom he shares a psychic bond. Instead of eliminating a sense of honor from public life, however, Godwin offers an alternative version of honor. Sharing with Burke a similar fear of post-revolutionary atomization, Godwin presents what he calls “true honor,” a virtue that avoids the sentimentalism and obsession with rank that characterized Burkean chivalry. In commiting to the general good whose circumference expands beyond white, propertied citizens, Godwin presupposes – or even exceeds – the ideals of liberal social democracy by more than a century.

Chapter 4 ends Part I of the book with an account of the reaction to Holwell’s and Dow’s ideas throughout Europe, pointing to how, despite their differences, the common ‘philosophical’ quality of their enquiries had a significant impact on numerous intellectual elements of the late Enlightenment period. This includes a discussion of debates on the legitimacy of Company governance and the significance for their work in debates on empire.

Chapter 3 addresses Edmund Burke’s role in the eighteenth-century reception of classical eloquence, investigating his provocative claim that disruptive, injudicious speech can act as a spur to sound political judgment and institutional health. While Cicero’s rhetoric and his model of public life celebrated risky spontaneity and was only loosely rule-governed, a range of Burke’s contemporaries argued that the rule-bound governance of the modern era demanded a complementary style of rule-bound speech: a discourse that was factual, restrained, dispassionate, and even happily mediocre. Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful made an important break with this line of thought, celebrating the sublime’s power to disrupt custom and ordinary time. His speeches and political writings built on this conceptual foundation, developing an account of the pain of judging and the allegedly defective deliberation that often serves to evade that pain, substituting rules and maxims for engagement with circumstantial complexities. Burke consistently argued that such deliberation is ultimately self-defeating and marked by a fatal lack of what I call “imaginative judgment.” Yet he also suggested that the rhetorical sublime – which might be excessive and even uncanny – was necessary to provoke the exercise of such judgment.