Attracting philosophers, politicians, artists as well as the educated reader, Edmund Burke’sPhilosophical Enquiry, first published in 1757, was a milestone in western thinking. This edited volume will take the 250th anniversary of thePhilosophical Enquiry as an occasion to reassess Burke’s prominence in the history of ideas. Situated on the threshold between early modern philosophy and the Enlightenment, Burke’s oeuvre combines reflections on aesthetics, politics and the sciences. This collection is the first book length work devoted primarily to Burke’sPhilosophical Enquiry in both its historical context and for its contemporary relevance. It will establish the fact that theEnquiry is an important philosophical and literary work in its own right.

Preface: Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry in context, M.F. Deckard, K. Vermeir.- Part 1: Science and Sensibility.- Philosophical Enquiries into the Science of Sensibility: An Introductory Essay, K. Vermeir, M.F. Deckard.- 'Communicating a Sort of Philosophical Solidity to Taste’: Newtonian Elements in Burke’s Methodology in Philosophical Enquiry, S. Ducheyne.- Hyporborean Meteorologies of Culture: Art’s Progress and Medical Environmentalism in Arbuthnot, Burke and Barr, A. Sarafianos.- From the Enquiry (1757) to the Fourth Kritisches Wäldchen (1769): Burke and Herder on the Division of the Senses, H. Parret.- Edmund Burke and John Locke on the Metaphysics of Substance, J. Pappin III.- Part 2: Sensibility in Politics, Sociability and Morals.- The Politics of Burke’s Enquiry, F.P. Lock.- Aisling Gheár  – A Terrible Beauty: The Gaelic Background to Burke's Enquiry, K. O’Donnell.- Pity and Fear: Providential Sociability in Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, R. Bourke.- Burke and Kant on the Social Nature of Aesthetic Experience, B. Vandenabeele.- The Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Political in Burke’s Work, D.I. O’Neill.- Part 3: Aesthetics and the Science of Sensibility.- Burke’s Classical Heritage: Playing Games with Longinus, C. Ryan.- Edmund Burke among the Poets: Milton, Lucretius and the Philosophical Enquiry, P. Bullard.- ‘Expressive Uncertainty’: Edmund Burke’s Theory of the Sublime and Eighteenth-Century Conceptions of Metaphor, F. De Bruyn.- Between Knowledge and Sentiment: Burke and Hume on Taste, D. Perinetti.- Burke, the Revenge of Obscurity and the Foundation of the Aesthetic, B.S. Girons.