| Popis: |
In most eighteenth-century Anglo-American and European thought, the imagination was a dangerous faculty, at odds with ‘hermeneutics’ as a system of interpretation. This chapter, however, will argue that the sanctified imagination is key to understanding Edwards’s overall hermeneutic, which will be defined as his system of typology whereby any and everything—textual, material, or ideational—can and does point to the nature of being as God’s self-communication. It will trace scholarly debates about Edwards’s place in eighteenth-century epistemological controversies, his conflictual relationship with the idea of the ‘imagination’ within these debates (in relationship to his aesthetic theology), and scholarly attempts to understand his unique system of typology as his particular hermeneutical theory. The chapter ends by exploring future directions for scholarship by thinking of his typological system as a form of ‘imperial epistemology’ that expands how we think of Edwards’s colonial context and relationship to debates about modernity. |
