19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Coleridge is often and rightly credited with introducing German psychological and aesthetic ideas to British readers in the early nineteenth century. But what did he take the business of those disciplines to be and how were they related in his mind? This paper puts forward an extended speculation identifying points of continuity and rupture between British (neo-Lockean) proto-psychological thought of the eighteenth century and the tradition associated with Wolff and Moritz. It also describes his absorption of Kantian ideas, especially concerning 'disinterestedness'.