This essay traces the study of the vexed topic of sentimentalism in long nineteenth-century American critical discourse. Over the past decades, scholars have drawn upon different disciplines and critical theories to reframe the expansive and subtle complexities of sentimentalism’s influence as mode and ideology; these investigations, under the capacious term “feeling,” sometimes dovetail with, and other times are disaggregated from, inquiries into sympathy, affect studies, the sensorium, and the history of emotions. Although the turn to affect has been seen as a way out of political overdetermination, concerns about liberatory potential and structural collusions were prefigured and informed by debates about sentimentality’s ethical bind. This essay turns to negative terms, glossing the use of “unfeeling” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and then appearances of “unfeeling” and “unsympathetic” in illustrative scholarship over the last three decades for their operations and implications. The chapter then teases out the cultural politics of unfeeling from a queer, feminist of color perspective: What if one reconsiders unfeeling from the vantage point of those marginalized and not simply as hegemonic imposition? The discussion closes with Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša, reassessing the Indigenous activist’s wish, in her own words, to become “unfeeling stone.”

This chapter offers an exposition of Collingwood’s theory of imagination as presented in the commonly overlooked Book Two of The Principles of Art. I show how the standard objections to Collingwood’s view are relatively superficial, and also how the account in Book Two should be understood in the light of Collingwood’s remarks concerning the imagination in his earlier writings (especially Speculum Mentis and Outlines of a Philosophy of Art). For Collingwood, sense perception inseparably involves the imagination of possible objects of perception in any perceptual experience. Moreover, the imagination makes the sensory object thinkable – a position that blends Kantian and Humean motifs. Additionally, the crucial mark of the imaginary object is self-containment (“monadism”), a notion serving to clarify both Collingwood’s claim that the imagination is indifferent to reality or unreality and the conceptual connection, on his view, between imagination and art.

By 1660 the number of common criminals hanged in England had fallen dramatically: but England still executed far more people than other European states. That practice was sustained in part, in the minds of England’s urbane peoples, by a time-honoured perception of crime as a moral failing akin to others, albeit of far greater social consequence. By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, however, that vision was being eroded by two cultural transformations. First, a more worldly (secular) vision bred impatience with the idea that the most lasting and certain punishment of serious crime must be left to God’s Last Judgment rather than achieved in the here and now. Such views were reinforced, secondly, by a new culture of feeling, which inspired not only distaste for the physical and emotional sufferings inflicted upon serious criminals, but also (contrarily) greater anxiety about the threat of their crimes.

The transition from one culture of governance to another explains the character and timing of changes in the nature, location and scale of English executions from 1660 to 1900. Traditional landed elites adhered both to a “Bloody Code,” whose enforcement against common criminals could be regularly adjusted through consultations between trial judges and themselves, and to the occasional use of prolongedly agonizing execution rituals against traitors. The men who dominated England’s uniquely extensive and steadily expanding urban realms, and embraced new cultures of desacralization, feeling and reason, increasingly viewed the purposes, numerical extent and staging of executions differently. As the numbers and power of urbane people grew, first the extent and finally the practices of execution were adjusted accordingly. The many paradoxes of “feeling”, however, ensured their continued commitment to execution for murder, and some measure of hypocrisy in their views of executions and the people who attended them.

The Murder Act of 1752 imposed post-mortem dissection as the primary punishment for all people convicted of that crime. Recent historians have viewed this statute as strikingly regressive. In fact, its purposes and effects were notably humane. It dramatically reduced the number of dissections imposed on criminal bodies in London. By almost entirely confining dissection to murder alone, it substantially ended riots at executions. And, in ensuring a legal supply of “subjects” to anatomists, it helped make surgery as swift as possible in an age before reliable anaesthesia. On the other hand, public anatomization of dead killers was so uncommon that it seems likely to have inspired fascination rather than deterrent horror. And, in failing to supply enough “subjects,” the Act inspired epidemical levels of grave robbery, finally coming undone when enterprising monsters resorted to murder itself in meeting the needs of anatomists, who now seemed complicit in such crimes.

This chapter addresses Jacobi’s literary contributions, Edward Allwill’s Collection of Letters and Woldemar, in the context of his critique of both Enlightenment reason and feeling. Both, Jacobi argues, undermined human individuality and freedom.

Karl Heinrich Heydenreich contends in “On Moral Freedom” (1791) that the human being is originally endowed with consciousness of freedom. Moreover, Heydenreich explicitly denies that our consciousness of freedom is a consequence of consciousness of the moral law and instead maintains that the moral law provides only indirect support for our innate consciousness of freedom. Similar to Snell’s contention that our freedom is revealed to us through the feeling of our own self, at one point Heydenreich refers to our feeling of freedom. According to Heydenreich, the task of philosophy is to secure this feeling of freedom from the skepticism of speculative reason.

This section outlines the contents and purpose of the book. It asks why we should read poetry, what a poem is, and how we can connect with poems and understand and enjoy them.

This chapter reviews how the early post-Kantians perceived the need of reforming Kant’s Critique in order to complete the philosophical revolution it had initiated. In 1785, Jacobi had brought Spinoza to the discussion, claiming that his monism undermined human freedom and personality. He further claimed that this monism was the logical conclusion of all philosophy. The post-Kantians’ task was thus threefold: (1) to demonstrate that personalism is consistent which monism, which they in principle accepted as the necessary standpoint of reason; (2) to show that Kant’s idealism could be the basis for the desired personalism; and (3) to overcome what they took to be the formalism of Kant’s system that stood in the way of it. All this came down to ridding the system of its presumed unknown “thing-in-itself” while finding a principle that would unify it internally, not just by means of external reflection. Fichte had attempted this with his “I.” Even more important, however, was his analysis of feeling, which he considered the concrete counterpart of the “I” and which, as in the feeling of guilt, brought reason and nature together. This was the synthesis that the post-Kantian idealists explored in their different ways.

In this chapter, I begin to develop an account of why psychopaths are unable to see other people as sources of value, a claim that is necessary for the central argument of the book as developed in Chapter 3. Having described psychopathy as a condition characterised primarily by emotional deficiencies, I look to the emotions for evidence of why psychopaths are as they are. I consider the three main philosophical theories of the emotions – cognitivist, ‘feeling’ and perceptualist theories – before settling on a hybrid account, according to which emotions are complexes of thought and feeling. Based on this, I interrogate the relationship between emotions and value, suggesting that emotions play a role in our ability to ascribe value to things in the world. I then trace the implications of these conclusions for the ability of psychopaths, given their emotional deficiencies, to engage evaluatively with the world.

The chapter is devoted to Fichte’s genetic account of agency that comes to the foreground in Part II of the System of Ethics. As the chapter shows, what motivates this second deduction is a concern to avoid what Fichte calls “empty formula philosophy” which fails to explain how willing an object is possible. Fichte sets out to avoid this shortcoming by offering a complex theory of the drives, focusing first on what he calls our “lower capacity of desire.” The chapter argues that the key to understanding this section of the System of Ethics lies in Fichte’s attempt to derive the character of our “natural drive” from how we represent the system of nature as a whole. At the center of this derivation we find Fichte draw upon an organicist model of nature. This organicist model gives Fichte the resources to present an original theory of desire as an activity of “forming and being formed” by natural objects.

This chapter is about sensibility, which is the term that was commonly used in the second half of the eighteenth century to refer to a special capacity to respond with sensitivity to one’s environment. Colloquially understood as the heightened responsiveness of feeling or emotion, sensibility – in cultural, literary, artistic, historical, social, philosophical, and political contexts – reached far beyond what either of these more familiar terms convey. Eighteenth-century thinking about sensibility, in all of its complexity, remains deeply relevant to twenty-first century theories of affect, feeling, and emotion, and provides robust resources for, and in some cases correctives to, current theoretical and philosophical thought.