ABSTRACT
The standard Shelley of the academic curriculum is philosophically incoherent: he is made to reconcile—sometimes eclectically, sometimes through one or a series of supposed philosophical conversions over the course of his career—the realism (or idealism) of Plato, the empiricism of Locke, and the skepticism of Hume. Alternatively, Shelley is presented as a philosophically astute master and champion of the history of skepticism in its many varieties. This Shelley’s Plato—like his Locke and his Hume—is interpreted skeptically so that Shelley holds no criterion of truth whatever, not even the truth of the proposition that no truth can be found. One way out of this morass is to argue, as many have, that Shelley is not principally a philosopher or even a philosopher-poet at all; instead he is a thoughtful and intellectually coherent aesthetician, an artist from whom we should not ask logical consistency or philosophical/metaphysical rigor, but only what we surely have: beautiful works. By refashioning our otherwise menacing world where death, vacancy, evanescence, and despair hold sway, such works quell our natural anxieties through purely aesthetic means. Aesthetic value thus trumps moral, political, epistemic, and religious value, just as it opens out on the fields of semiotics, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, feminism, and Marxism. Although every available approach has undeniable heuristic value, I have proposed in this study a rather different Shelley.
