Search results for "William Kingdon Clifford"

La croyance dans le fumoir : “The Portrait of Mr. WH”, l’éthique de la croyance de William Kingdon Clifford et l’assentiment selon John Henry Newman

2023

Wilde’s story “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” blurs literary genres, asserts the importance of the false and plays with reader expectations. It has generated a substantial exege- sis, perhaps lacking in interest in the multi-faceted debates on belief running through the 1870s-1880s. Wilde takes part in that debate through a text of uncertain status and complex editorial history, contrasting Newmanian assent with W.K. Clifford’s ethics of belief (1877), before asserting the supremacy of desire, thus ruining all assent and epistemically justified belief. To the demanding philosophical-religious theories of Clifford and Newman, Wilde responds with an ambiguous, subversive narrative, intended to com…