Philosophers speak of newly accessed ways of knowing reality as epistemological shifts. This book demonstrates how Shakespeare effected a massive shift of just this kind in his bold management of theatricalisation itself. These pages levy on terms of Kant and Husserl that they elaborated in proposals for such shifts. It will be seen that Shakespeare exceeds the proposals of the philosophers. He anticipates and already brings to a working consummation a systematic and immediate access to the ways of knowing reality that they contemplate as hoped-for desiderata. In, and through, the drama of consciousness played out in the pairs of plays examined here, the playwright and the spectator together - intersubjectively - attain to an 'onlooker' consciousness that exits the fictionality, the play-acting, of theatricalisation; and they are enabled to recover the actuality of objects in their worlds.

Philosophers speak of newly accessed ways of knowing reality as epistemological shifts. This book demonstrates how Shakespeare effected a massive shift of just this kind in his bold management of theatricalisation itself. These pages levy on terms of Kant and Husserl that they elaborated in proposals for such shifts. It will be seen that Shakespeare exceeds the proposals of the philosophers. He anticipates and already brings to a working consummation a systematic and immediate access to the ways of knowing reality that they contemplate as hoped-for desiderata. In, and through, the drama of consciousness played out in the pairs of plays examined here, the playwright and the spectator together - intersubjectively - attain to an 'onlooker' consciousness that exits the fictionality, the play-acting, of theatricalisation; and they are enabled to recover the actuality of objects in their worlds.

These essays--which consider a wide variety of cultures from ancient Egypt to contemporary Japan-- describe the conditions under which cultures that do not dominate each other may yet achieve a limited translatability of cultures.

The fourteen essays in this volume--which consider a wide variety of cultures from ancient Egypt to contemporary Japan--address both sorts of discourse and elucidate the two-way or mutual conditioning of cultural positions as well as the illusions and exclusions created by mutuality.

The articulation of the unsayable, of negativity-that which has been excluded by what is sayable-is one of the most important areas of contemporary humanistic study. This volume brings together fifteen outstanding literary theorists and philosophers to examine ways to make the unsayable tangible.

"Kant and Milton" brings to bear new evidence and long-neglected materials to show the importance of Kant s encounter with Milton s poetry to the formation of Kant s moral and aesthetic thought. Sanford Budick reveals the relation between a poetic vision and a philosophy that theorized what that poetry was doing. As Plato and Aristotle contemplate Homer, so Kant contemplates Milton. In all these cases philosophy and poetry allow us to better understand each other. Milton gave voice to the transformation of human understanding effected by the Protestant Revolt, making poetry of the idea that human reason is created self-sufficient. Kant turned that religiously inflected poetry into the richest modern philosophy. Milton s bold self-reliance is Kant s as well. Using lectures of Kant that have been published only in the past decade, Budick develops an account of Kant based on his lifelong absorption in the poetry of Milton, especially "Paradise Lost." By bringing to bear the immense power of his reflections on aesthetic and moral form, Kant produced one of the most penetrating interpretations of Milton s achievement that has ever been offered and, at the same time, reached new peaks in the development of aesthetics and moral reason.