The various contributions in this collection explore the kinship and the conflicts which bind literature and art to philosophy during two major phases of Romanticism, in Germany and in England, opening passages and highlighting continuities between the philosophical ambitions and innovations of Romantic artists and the legacy of Romanticism in philosophy and literary and aesthetic theory. Each in its own way, the essays gathered here view Romanticism as a key moment in the history of thought and examine how Romanticism both inherits and departs from the tradition of philosophy, from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, as much as they explore the many legacies of Romanticism in contemporary philosophical debates up to Deconstruction and beyond. Written by philosophers, literary scholars and art historians, the different chapters not only confront British Romanticism with its German counterpart, in an effort to reconfigure our understanding of these two national "moments" in the history of Romanticism, but they also work at the crossroads of several disciplines, true to the inaugural spirit of Romanticism, at a time when generic and institutional boundaries were challenged and largely redrawn, and when art, literature and philosophy as we still know them today first emerged.
Anthony Collins (1676-1729) is most often remembered for his Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713) but his philosophical positions are equally audacious and largely innovative: the denial of God's intelligence and design, the rejection of the existence of an immaterial soul, the affirmation of a deterministic conception of nature, the idea of man as a machine close to the animal, with equally hedonistic impulses. However, although these tenets form the core of his philosophical works, Collins was more attached to the ideal of intellectual liberty than to his own convictions. Which is why, throughout his life, from his exchanges with Locke to the debates that were carried out in his private library, he continually pursued open confrontation, rejecting with cutting irony any limitation on the freedom of thought.
