Mitchell, Micky R. (Author)
Stephen A. Tedeschi (Advisor)
Stephen A. Tedeschi
The University of Alabama
Publication date: 2022
Language: English
Physical Details: 187
Romantic-era discourses on dreams often concern methodology, or how an individual processes knowledge and experience. As the debate rages in Romantic science between rational deduction and empirical induction, creative authors seize on the disunity. Both the deductive and the inductive methodologies of Romantic science relegate dreams to unscientific thought, and Romantic poets and novelists harness the ambiguity of dreams in scientific discourses to question the methodological approaches on which the scientific community is built. Dreams emerge as a Romantic epistemological problem in the Scottish Enlightenment. Romantic literary scholars interested in dreams neglect the debate between David Hume and Andrew Baxter concerning the immateriality of the soul, a debate that may have cost Hume the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University. Baxter argues against Hume’s skeptical and empirical philosophy of mind and articulates a rationally argued metaphysics favoring the existence of an immaterial soul. Baxter builds his metaphysics on the inertness of matter and Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, and his work articulates a dream theory in which disembodied spirits cause dreams through a supernatural interaction with human physiology in which they activate the senses immaterially. The debate between Hume and Baxter occurs as the concepts of vitality emerge in Scottish physiology that instigate the debates on dreams in Romantic medicine. Scottish physiologists first incorporate the concept of the immaterial soul into scientific discourse through the concept of vitality, the study of the unverifiable principle or power that creates and sustains life. This concept of vitality and the resonance of dreams in early physiological discourses structure the medical concepts driving the Romantic vitality debates. This dissertation reconstructs those cultural discourses through close-readings of both scientific texts and literary dreams in the works of various Romantic authors and artists: including Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Henry Fuseli, James Beattie, William Lawrence, John Abernethy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, James Curry, and John Keats. These authors consider whether these dreams and nightmares originate from spirits, the body, or the imagination, and literary authors utilize an aesthetic of dreaming to interrogate the methodologies and the epistemology of the emerging sciences.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Richardson, Alan;
(2001)
British Romanticism and the science of the mind
Article
Cornejo, Carlos;
(2015)
Searching for the Microcosm: A Glimpse into the Roots of Vygotsky's Holism
Thesis
Johnson, Jeffrey C.;
(2012)
Anatomies of the Soul and the Self, From Galen to Romanticism
Article
Stephanie L. Schatz;
(2015)
Lewis Carroll’s Dream-child and Victorian Child Psychopathology
Book
Samuel Taylor Coleridge;
Giordano Ghirelli;
(2024)
Teoria della vita
Article
Calloway B. Scott;
(2023)
The Body, Experience, and the History of Dream-Science in Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica
Thesis
Yanan Qizhi;
(2020)
Dream Culture in Early Modern Lutheranism, 1530-1730
Thesis
Kamerbeek, Christopher;
(2010)
The Ghost and the Corpse: Figuring the Mind/Brain Complex at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Thesis
Malane, Rachel Ann;
(2004)
“Sex in Mind”: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences
Thesis
Robert John Schimelpfenig;
(2015)
Life in the Anthropocene; A Cosmic Drama: Exploring the Human-nature Relationship as a History of Ideas in Modern Philosophical Movements and Its Interpretation Through an Embodied Experience in the Columbia River Basin
Article
Joshua Bauchner;
(2021)
Fechner on a Walk: Everyday Investigations of the Mind-Body Relationship
Book
Carmela Morabito;
(2020)
Il motore della mente. Il movimento nella storia delle scienze cognitive
Article
Carluccio, Dana;
(2013)
The Cognitive Fictions and Functions of Gender in Evolutionary Psychology and Poststructuralist Theory
Article
Sobol, Valeria;
(2006)
Nerves, Brain, or Heart? The Physiology of Emotions and the Mind-Body Problem in Russian Sentimentalism
Article
Christopher Fowles;
(2020)
The Heart of Flesh: Nietzsche on Affects and the Interpretation of the Body
Article
Michele Vagnetti;
(2024)
Rudolph Hermann Lotze's philosophically informed psychology
Book
Mattia Riccardi;
(2021)
Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology
Book
Schweizer, Stefan;
(2008)
Anthropologie der Romantik. Körper, Seele und Geist. Anthropologische Gottes-, Welt- und Menschenbilder der wissenschaftlichen Romantik
Article
Sha, Richard C.;
(2009)
Toward a Physiology of the Romantic Imagination
Book
Drew Daniel;
(2013)
The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance
Be the first to comment!