“The Grammar of Instress: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Philosophers of Mind” in New Literary History (51:3, Summer 2020)
“The Grammar of Instress: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Philosophers of Mind”
Atti Viragh
New Literary History
(Johns Hopkins University Press, Volume 51, Number 3, Summer 2020)
This essay situates the rise of phenomenology in a philosophical debate of the early 1870s around the nature of mental phenomena and their susceptibility to scientific investigation. I argue that Gerard Manley Hopkins participates in this new discourse. His theory of “instress” derives from the same medieval concept, intentio, from which Brentano develops his own theory of intentionality a few years later. Recovering Hopkins’s conception of intentionality, and seeing its place in his metaphysics and poetics, shows an original, British approach to phenomenology emerging independently of Brentano and Husserl. It also throws into relief the broader theoretical problems of the later nineteenth century around the grounding of psychology and the future metaphysics.
Read more here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/765983