The Pluralism of William Hazlitt

FAIN: FT-12004-74

Paul H. Connolly
Yeshiva University (New York, NY 10033-3201)

To consider the relation of Hazlitt's epistemology and metaphysics to the prominent philosophies of the Enlightenment, specifically to the thought of Hobbes, Locke, Hartley: and to analyse the relations of Hazlitt's aesthetics to the prevailing premise of taste in the eighteenth century. To contrast his thought carefully with that of Coleridge, and to pursue in more detail Hazlitt's own ideas on the function of the imagination, the end and means of good criticism, and the morality of art, subjects already investigated by about which precise, accurate conclusions had to be drawn.