Stallknecht offers a cogent resolution of the internal conflict in Wordsworth's poetry between the stern demands of a rigidified sense of duty and the limitless reaches of imagination. The reader who embarks on this journey will experience seas of thought both strange and wonderful in their sweep and grandeur. This remarkable work, published when the author was 28, contains a clearly stated vision of the purpose of philosophy, a vision which Stallknecht maintained and deepened throughout a lifetime of reflection. Henri Bergson serves as the primary focus as far as sustained analysis of creation is concerned. However, other contemporaries of Bergson are also discussed and a substantial and precise treatment of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism shows how Whitehead's profound yet dense thinking complements and extends the Bergsonian approach toward creation.
Attention is paid throughout the work to the function of creativity in the worlds of literature.
The initial articles in this volume encompass several sustained reflections on the thought of Immanuel Kant as well as an extensive discussion of George Santayana, one of the American philosophers whose work influenced Stallknecht's own thinking. The treatments of metaphysics and epistemology focus on the nature of consciousness and the pivotal importance of creation and imagination in interpreting the meaning of possibility. Stallknecht's cosmopolitan approach to philosophical questions is such that discussion of a given issue frequently encompasses a comparative review of related positions by thinkers of different eras and apparently distinct traditions. The reader thus wins an informed perspective on relevant points in the history of philosophy as filtered through the particular issue under analysis. Stallknecht and Brumbaugh also provide chapters on the major movements in philosophy from 1850 until 1950, and discussions of moral philosophy as well as symbolic logic.