This book is an exploration of an aesthetic rationality. It finds common threads pointing to the major characteristics of this rationality in an historical sequence beginning with Dante and ending with phenomenology, and concludes with recommendations for the founding of a central humanist curriculum.

1 Introduction  1 On Aesthetic Rationality  2 Making and Receiving  3 In Praise of the Communal 2 Renaissance Humanism  1 Learning from Examples  2 Religious Thought  3 The World of Poetry  4 In Summary 3 Vico’s Philosophy  1 The World Made by Man  2 The Three Stages  3 Vico’s Legacy 4 The Inward Journey  1 Vico Today  2 The Journeying Self  3 The Work of the Imagination  4 The Truth of Art 5 The Lighted Realm  1 The Pre-reflective World  2 The First Language  3 The Lighted Realm  4 Beginning and Concluding 6 Contemplating the Paradox  1 Contemplating the Paradox  2 Plotinus on Contemplation  3 The Logic of Contradictory Identity 7 Precision and Soul  1 The Two Adaptations and the Principle of the Insufficient Cause  2 The Science of the Enlightened Mind  3 Aristotle  4 Goethe’s Art of Nature  5 Goethe’s Science  6 A Concluding Scientific Postscript 8 Aesthetic Rationality  1 The Sensus Communis  2 The Other Condition  3 Creative Fidelity 9 A Philosophy for Education  1 A Return to Self-Knowledge  2 Doing Good, Having Good Faith  3 A Philosophy for Education Index