Reading One's Own Mind: Hazlitt, Cognition, Fiction

Abstract

This essay analyzes William Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action as a bridge between eighteenth-century theories of sympathy and social feeling and more recent philosophical and scientific discussions of “theory of mind,” often shorthanded as “mindreading”: the basic strategies by which one mind recognizes and keeps track of another. Hazlitt counterintuitively argues that outward-directed protocols of sympathy and altruistic motivation are central even to ordinary, self-directed activities, from planning one's own future to recoiling from pain. He thus breaks down the division between inwardness and outward-directed thinking that structures much of the received tradition of Romantic imagination theory. What would the Romantic imagination look like, this essay asks, if we follow Hazlitt's suggestion and make mindreading its central process?

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