Newman's Illative Aesthetics; or, How to Philosophize with the Grammar

ABSTRACT: This essay offers an approach to Newman's Grammar of Assent through a twofold reading: of the language it deploys and the aesthetic standard which it raises. By inducing the very affects on which its epistemological claims depend, the Grammar 's language enables its reader to vivify concepts that would otherwise remain notional, cerebral, and inert. But in addition to justifying inferential (or illative) actions, Newman also aims to showcase exemplars of inference. Thus does the Grammar close with a consideration of the early Christian martyrs because these figures push the illative sense to its limit and, in so doing, illustrate this faculty's highest achievements.