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Reviewed by:
  • Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History
  • Miguel Tamen (bio)
Ross Hamilton , Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 320 pp.

Hamilton's book presents itself as a "philosophical and literary history." It has something of Auerbach's brand of intellectual history, but most of its ideas come from commentaries rather than primary texts. The main thesis seems to be that Aristotle's distinction between accident and substance "set in motion a system of thought whose conceptual fertility remains astonishing." The system is pseudonymically (or metonymically) presented as a long series of names and episodes, from Metaphysics Z and the equestrian mishaps of King Saul and Montaigne, to standard English department syllabic fare (Rousseau as Locke, Wordsworth as Rousseau, Kant as Burke, Jane Austen as George Eliot), along with discussions of Eucharist (the contemporary unbeliever's favorite sacrament) and a car accident. [End Page 561] It would be possible to say that Hamilton identifies properties and events by collapsing "accident" and "incident"—which is to say, using Aristotelian terms, by identifying what-sometimes-is and what-need-not-happen. To Hamilton, that identification is ultimately "what it means to be 'modern.' " I remain unpersuaded by the move and unpersuaded by the conceptual virtues of the word modernity.

Miguel Tamen

Miguel Tamen is professor of literary theory at the University of Lisbon and regular visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Matter of the Facts, Manners of Interpretation, and Friends of Interpretable Objects, as well as coeditor of A Revisionary History of Portuguese Literature.

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