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The term “double touch” occurs only once in the published work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a fact which belies the notable philosophical attention it is shown in his notebooks and letters. This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of double touch, examining the concept alongside the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This analysis frames double touch as a concept which engages with the lived experience of embodied consciousness and cognition, operating at the threshold between affective sensation and active practical volition. In this capacity, it will be shown how Coleridge makes use of the concept to challenge the deterministic model of human volition put forward by necessitarianism. The overall aim is to show how the concept of double touch functions as a bridge between Coleridge’s epistemic interests in sense experience and his moral philosophical concerns about the notion of human free will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I propose a reading of Coleridge and Hölderlin using Stanley Cavell’s philosophical theory of acknowledgment and avoidance as an interpretive rubric. I argue that recognition (acknowledgment) of the skeptical limits of reason and the imagination allow Hölderlin, through his poetical theory, philosophy and practice, to overcome the epistemological limits of the romantic imagination; this factor is instanced in his poetry. On the other hand, Coleridge's work remains trapped within skeptical limits because of his “avoidance” of this ontological recognition, which is due to his continued desire for an intellectual intuition. I further my argument by using the hermeneutics of Heidegger as a secondary tool in reading both poets and in helping to illuminate their relative poetic and philosophical positions. Both poets ultimately recognize the limits of our imaginative autonomy; however, they articulate these limits in very different ways – ways that are useful keys in unlocking the work of Coleridge and Hölderlin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Coleridge's investment in aesthetics and criticism has broadly been understood as an attempt to overcome the Kantian bargain by which knowledge of the world is gained by relinquishing the thing in itself. This paper seeks to supplement that understanding by recasting the stakes of Kant's critical philosophy in terms of a conflict over the limits and possibility of “discovery.” Drawing on contemporary accounts of discovery by Captain Cook and George Shelvocke, the essay explores the critical role discovery plays in the “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as an historical practice of maritime expansion and mapping, as a textual event, and as an integral moment in the practice of literary criticism, which is to say, of “reading.” Maritime discovery in the Rime, the essay argues, allegorizes literary criticism, revealing both the promise and the limits of the romantic conception of literature as containing its own criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]