The Introduction offers an overview of the main themes of the book, focusing especially on Hegel’s claim that our sensuous experience of beauty offers a distinctive access to metaphysical truth. The basic nature and parameters of this sensuous aesthetic experience – what Hegel calls “sensuous intuition” – are explored to set the stage for the analysis that follows. In anticipation of the book’s main claim about the distinctive sort of ontological truth that artworks in particular serve to reveal on Hegel’s account – namely, that they put us in touch with the transformative event of spirit’s birth in and through nature – the chapter includes a sketch of the path of the book from the ontology and aesthetics of nature through to the ontology and aesthetics of artworks.

This chapter addresses the second main challenge to Kant’s conception of autonomy: the sense that the opposition between nature and freedom renders the actuality of freedom unintelligible. Turning to the Inaugural Dissertation and the three critiques, the second chapter shows that tackling the problem requires us to first overcome a widespread misunderstanding of Kant’s notion of the intelligible world. The intelligible world is not a given world available to theoretical cognition but initially accessible only through practical cognition as a world that ought to be. The chapter develops a new interpretation of Kant’s use of the principle “ought implies can” to show how the moral self-consciousness of the ought provides the realm of freedom with a first degree of actuality that, however, remains insufficient on its own. For freedom to be truly realized, we have to realize our freedom in the natural world by endowing it with a different purposive form. The third Critique offers unrecognized resources to explain how such a realization may be possible. By means of its account of natural purposiveness and the feeling of life, it redescribes external and subjective nature in such a manner that we can see how freedom may take root in them. By means of its account of fine, Kant specifies the general form of processes through which we can transform given nature and produce a second nature expressive of ideas. The chapter closes by considering why Kant did not fully develop these resources and why freedom remains ultimately unreal in his own account, something especially obvious in his discussion of the highest good.

Ignatius Sancho is the subject of a fabulous 1768 portrait by Thomas Gainsborough now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. He has also been associated with images by Hogarth, and copies of his business card for his Westminster shop, sometimes attributed to Hogarth, are held in the V&A and the British Museum. This chapter explores Sancho’s relationship to eighteenth-century London’s visual culture not only through images by Gainsborough and Hogarth, but also through Sancho’s own rhetorical style, and the networks and relationships with artist correspondents that emerge through his letters, arguing that Sancho emerges as an agent as well as a subject in eighteenth-century British visual culture.

This chapter examines the representation of the common tree rhododendron in two nineteenth-century collections of botanical illustrations. The first is an engraving from Exotic Flora (1823–7), a book series compiled by English botanist William Jackson Hooker. The second is a watercolor from Specimens of Flowering Plants (c. 1830s–40s), an album that was commissioned by British Captain Frederick Parr from five Indian artists in the state of Madras (Tamil Nadu). When compared with one another, these two works not only reflect the importance of images to colonial plant science, but also raise questions about the power of botanical illustration to visualize the complexities of a large environment. Placing these books into dialogue with one another allows us to reevaluate the environmental affordances of botanical illustration as a genre, while also demonstrating how emerging theories from critical plant studies can enrich our understanding of Anglo-Indian scientific exchanges in the nineteenth century.

Sellars’s quest for a comprehensive philosophy led him to consider the possibility and desirability of somehow fusing or joining two distinct ‘images’ of humanity-in-the-universe: the manifest image of common sense and the scientific image that has come to rival it. Against this, Rorty urges a conception of “vocabularies” that we use to engage in self-fashioning and self-transformation. I argue that we should reject the identification of the manifest image with common sense in order to make room for what Rorty calls “abnormal discourses.” Abnormal discourses play an important role in how we change our conception of what we are. However, I agree with Sellars that the scientific image does tell us something about how things really are. I conclude that we should not want to fuse or join the two images, because they have distinct roles to play in human life.

Chapter 6 (Mishnah ‘Abodah Zarah 3:4 and the Bad Faith Argument): In this chapter, I analyze the existing scholarship on the much-discussed narrative of Rabban Gamliel in the Bathhouse of Aphrodite in m. ‘Abodah Zarah 3:4. I then propose that Rabban Gamliel’s response to Proclus within the story is, in fact, best understood as a deployment of the “Bad Faith Argument.”

Arthurian topics feature in medieval mural painting and sculpture in architecture from the early twelfth century onwards. The ‘spatial’ aspects of these art forms were ideal for medieval patrons to represent and promote themselves to others. They competed through monumental art – be it in their own residence, a town hall, or a church – to show their identity and status. This chapter traces the main trends, iconographical topics, and influences, with consideration of the social and political function of the representation of Arthur and his knights in medieval monumental art.

William James has a complex and intriguing relationship to aesthetics. Although he is the classical pragmatist who had the deepest relationship to the arts, James never devoted a book or an academic article to aesthetic theory. He intentionally refrained from this not only because of his disappointments in reading the texts of philosophical aesthetics but also because of what he perceived as the inherent limits of aesthetic theory. Notwithstanding these severe reservations, James gave aesthetic principles a pervasive and important place in his philosophy. This paper examines both James’s reservations about aesthetic theory and the various significant roles he grants to aesthetic principles in his theories of knowledge, action, ethics, and affective life. One of the key problems James saw in aesthetic theory results from the way it inevitably comes up against the generality and limits of language. This is particularly true with respect to the language of theory. This chapter provides a detailed examination of this issue and its consequences.

This chapter examines various ways in which Arthur and Arthurian legend have been visualised between 1500 and 1800; not confined to manuscripts, it offers a cross-medium account of the legend’s visual representation, including physical installations, engravings, antiquarian juvenilia, as well as architecture and applied art. It examines the ways in which these visualisations present their narratives and how the figures are defined. This chapter also explores how Arthurian figures are identified and located within history, notably by devices including heraldry and architecture, and how these devices are employed to afford various senses of the antique, status and significance.

In this chapter, Angela Duckworth, Elisa New, and Ross Weissman reflect on William James’s ongoing influence on their work in the fields of psychology, literature, and education. This dialogue presents James not only as a subject of historical interest, but as a thinker relevant for a contemporary audience and their questions – whether a graduate student, professor, or educational leader. As such, Duckworth, New, and Weissman discuss how James’s writings have informed different stages of their own careers and their approaches to classroom pedagogy, scholarship, work beyond the academy, and much more. Central to this chapter is Talks to Teachers and how James’s psychological insights remain relevant, informing their engagement with students in the twenty-first century. In Talks, Duckworth, New, and Weissman find a model for teaching, interdisciplinarity, and the importance and means of reaching wider audiences.

This conversation draws on an online discussion ‘Casa Adentro (Inside the House): Anti-Racist Art Practices’ (21 May 2021) held with the Afro-Colombian dance company Sankofa Danzafro and the Afro-Colombian art collective Colectivo Aguaturbia. The participants explore the concerns and creative processes that reflect on the durability of racialised social orders and the way racism is manifest in various areas of the lives of Afro-descendant men and women in Colombia. The artists reflect on these issues on the basis of their anti-racist artistic practices.