This article considers the role of emotion in John Henry Newman's Grammar of Assent by distinguishing five different ways (or ‘models’) in which the emotions play a positive epistemic role in relation to cognition. The most important of these, the Cognitive-Emotion Model, offers a new account of Newman's crucial idea of real assent, one that stresses the primary role of the emotions in real assent rather than imagination. This model helps to explain the nature of real assent by highlighting Newman's portrayal of an emotional way of knowing an object that is personal or individual, incommunicable, vivid, and motive. In this study of the relations between emotion and cognition I hope to highlight unexplored aspects of the nature of real assent and the importance of the role of emotion in it and hope to show how Newman's epistemology offers a rich framework for exploring the positive epistemic contributions of the emotions.

On what rational grounds can one say that Christianity is true? John Henry Newman's answer to this question lays great emphasis on the subjective, personal dimensions of knowledge, which he claims are no less reasonable than formal logical argumentation. Among these dimensions is conscience. The clearest proof for God's existence, Newman argues, is provided by the experience of God in one's conscience. In this article, I will argue that there is another similar element of Newman's thought: the immediate encounter between Christ and the mind through the impress of the image of Christ. What conscience is to the certainty of God's existence, this image of Christ is to the certainty of Christianity.

This paper will examine the relationship between Samuel Wilberforce and John Henry Newman. The two priests had a common cause in their wish to see the Church of England rediscover its Catholic identity – which led them to work alongside one another at the beginning of the Oxford Movement – but quickly drifted apart because of their strong divergences on the nature of the Church and the place of Tradition, as well as Samuel Wilberforce’s strong hostility to Rome. The paper also examines the place of Samuel Wilberforce’s young brother in this relationship.

This article engages with an example of Newman's reception in 20th Century thought, in Raymond Williams's Culture and Society from 1958. Williams considers that Newman's wording in The Idea of a University demonstrates a particular moment in the development of the semantic field of the word ‘culture’, which is indicated by the fact Newman does not use the word at an important juncture in his text. Williams also locates Newman in a developing trajectory of English understandings of culture at a point when (what we now term) culture was presented as a surrogate religion. Both of these points are responded to by showing that the word ‘culture’ would not have served the purpose Williams apportions to it for Newman's argument, and that Newman should not be associated with those for whom the domain of culture was emerging as an alternative to religion in the 19th Century. Moreover, this analysis will show that Newman's understanding of what we today term ‘culture’ should be understood in terms of a broader semantic cluster best captured by the word “sensibility”: a set of pervasive tendencies, predispositions, and qualities.

It is commonly held that that the dominance of logical positivism, in the early part of the twentieth-century, hindered Newman's philosophical recognition. However, commentators also argue that Newman's writing began to gain wider recognition following Wittgenstein's reference to “H Newman” (1969) in the posthumous publication of On Certainty. This essay explores whether or not this version of the history of Newman's philosophical reception rings true – exploring whether or not the reference to “H Newman” really marks a watershed for Newman's philosophical legacy.

John Henry Newman’s engagement with classical antiquity is one of the less fully researched areas of his work. An examination of Newman’s shifting relationship with the classics sheds valuable light both on his own religious concerns and on broader tensions and trends in Victorian Christian culture. This article initiates three lines of inquiry. First, it examines, one by one, several distinct and competing conceptions of classical pagan antiquity which Newman employed in his writings. Second, it considers Newman’s views on the continuing practical application of classical literature and learning. Third, it looks specifically at the novel Callista, the only book that Newman wrote which is set wholly against the backdrop of the pagan Graeco-Roman world. It may be seen that Newman’s relationship with the classics forms a microcosm of how Victorian Christian society struggled by turns to align itself with and to distance itself from differing visions of classicism and paganism. His works exemplify the diverse ways in which his culture could praise and criticise the classical world.

John Henry Newman is widely acknowledged to be an important theologian. However Newman commentators suggest that his work has received little recognition by philosophers. The general consensus has been that until the latter part of the twentieth century Newman has been an isolated philosophical figure. This essay offers an historical re‐evaluation of Newman's philosophical reception in order to explore whether or not his significance has been underestimated. The historical method is used in the analysis and assessment of this question. The study therefore probes the general philosophical reaction to Newman's work in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In doing so the essay offers an historical investigation and re‐evaluation of the claims of Newman having a negligible philosophical legacy.

The diverse forms of socialism which emerged in the nineteenth century had a complex relationship with both Christian beliefs and the Churches. Socialist movements are commonly remembered as anti-religious and anti-clerical. Doubt, forged in the familiar nineteenth-century ‘crisis of faith’, shaped not only Marxism, but also Owenism, the earlier social theories of Robert Owen. Church historians have long pointed to another narrative of socialism and religion in the Victorian era: the rise of Christian Socialism after 1848, led by F. D. Maurice, J. M. Ludlow, Charles Kingsley and others. Here, they recall a response to doubt with faith, and an answer to anti-clericalism with a new vision for the Churches’ social role. Yet socialism before 1848 had a more contested interaction with Christianity than this history assumes. By exploring the specific nature of Christian doubt among early Owenite socialists, then following how this doubt was answered by contemporary Christian supporters of Owen, this essay uncovers an alternative, noteworthy response to doubting Christianity – the nature of Christian hope in early socialism.

John Henry Newman believed that all Christian doctrines must be accessible to all Christian believers, both the intellectually sophisticated and the uneducated. This implied that the intellectually simple must be able to apprehend and assent to mysteries, such as that of the Trinity. This paper discussion what Newman understood by the idea of mystery. Mystery for Newman was primarily a hermeneutical problem. Mystery was a result of the human incapacity and inability to grasp the fullness of truth. In Newman, the hermeutical problematic is one of limitations of language thus leading to submission of intellect to a sublime truth.

This article examines the place of wonder in Newman's account of university education. It pays particular attention to Newman's ‘Rise and Progress of Universities’ (1872) rather than to his better known The Idea of a University (1873). The article first introduces some ideas about wonders and wondering, as found in medieval thought and in Newman's writings, before proceeding to the wonder that was Newman's attempt to establish a university in Dublin, and that is his history (historia) of the university: a story (fabula) that is every bit as marvellous as any medieval tale. Newman's educational romance involves the islands of Britannia and Hibernia, and the cities of Athens, Rome and Dublin. The article also considers the place of personal encounter and the written word in Newman's idea and practice of education, before finally offering some brief reflections on the diversity of modern society and university education. The article closes by suggesting the necessity of wonder for the gaining of knowledge.

Of the two sorts of doubt, interdenominational doubt and fundamental religious doubt, Newman does not seem to have suffered from the latter and did not write a great deal about it. What he did write, especially about conscience, is not convincing for a later secular age. What is more fruitful is how Newman related to other doubters of his age: his younger brother Francis who finished a Unitarian, and Matthew Arnold and his younger brother Tom who (twice) became a Catholic. John Newman first shunned his brother but in the end maintained friendly but distant relations with unbelievers. But Victorian doubt was inherited and the real threat to what Newman stood for came from a later generation.