Abstract
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful; edited and introduced by Paul Guyer (Oxford: OUP, 2015. £7.99. pp. 208. ISBN 978-0-19-966871-7).
The sixteenth century German Lutheran mystic Jacob Boehme and the eighteenth century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, both had a significant influence on modern theological and philosophical accounts of creation, nature, beauty and the sublime. Boehme’s position in The Signature of All Things is sometimes described as pantheism but it is a long way from Spinoza’s thoroughgoing pantheism and closer to some of Thomas Aquinas’ insightful descriptions of the work of the Spirit in enlivening creation. Boehme’s text was an important influence on modern accounts of the relation of God as Trinity to the cosmos, creation or ‘nature’, including those of Hegel, William Blake and Alfred North Whitehead. The reissue of the Elliston English translation as revised by William Law is therefore a welcome new book from Lutterworth Press. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful has been even more influential in the shaping of how moderns describe and experience the nonhuman world. Philosophical aesthetics, landscape aesthetics, modern accounts of nature as wilderness, and nature writing about mountains, rivers, forests and ‘scenes’, have all been signally shaped by Burke’s essay and Paul Guyer, of Brown University, has provided an excellent new edition with an engaging preface in this new and low priced paperback from Oxford University Press.