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Introduction: Love thinking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2010

Adela Pinch
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Summary

We tend to feel that thinking about people we love is the next best thing to being with them. But the history of ideas about the powers of the mind is full of strange accounts that describe the act of thinking about another as an ethically complex, sometimes even a dangerously powerful thing to do. This book seeks to explain why nineteenth-century British writers – poets, novelists, philosophers, psychologists, devotees of the occult – were both attracted to and repulsed by radical or substantial notions of purely mental relations between persons, and why they moralized about the practice of thinking about other people in interesting ways. It explores why, when, and under what conditions nineteenth-century writers found it possible, or desirable, to believe that thinking about another person could affect him or her, for good or for ill. Such a study is designed to shed some light on our own beliefs in our mental powers: when does a belief in our mental powers over another seem delusional, and when might holding such a belief seem in fact an essential part of being a moral person? Studying the ways in which nineteenth-century texts account for the act of thinking about another person may, I propose, provide new insights into the logic of ideas about mental causation, practical ethics, and the sociability of the mind. When are we likely to conceive of “thinking,” as did Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1801), “as a pure act & energy…Thinking as distinguished from Thoughts”?

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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  • Introduction: Love thinking
  • Adela Pinch, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book: Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing
  • Online publication: 05 October 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511779275.001
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  • Introduction: Love thinking
  • Adela Pinch, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book: Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing
  • Online publication: 05 October 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511779275.001
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction: Love thinking
  • Adela Pinch, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book: Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing
  • Online publication: 05 October 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511779275.001
Available formats
×