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Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on May 14, 2007
Literary Imagination 2007 9(2):143-161; doi:10.1093/litimag/imm018
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Accidental Sublime

The Double Significance of Accident

Ross Hamilton

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

For the contemporary reader, the term "accident" instinctively conjures a surprising and unexpected event. Yet the first applications of this term, which occurred in Aristotle's Categories and his Metaphysics, bore another signification. In his attempt to define the essence of things in nature, he used the term ousia to distinguish the essential and unchanging substance from its fluctuating or accidental qualities, which he called symbebekos. Because he also adopted the term symbebekos to define an event that caused a deviation from the intended outcome of an act, the word accident entered the vocabulary of philosophy carrying a double significance. Although often obscured by our current emphasis on the accidental event, this double significance endured within the afterlife of Aristotelian thought.

The dichotomy between substance and accident, the essential versus the inessential, permeated both theology and emerging secular philosophy. For centuries it informed thinking about the natural world and . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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