Reading: (1) Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 409 (photocopy; also available as PDF file)
      (2) Addison, The Spectator, nos. 411, 416, 418 (CT, 284–288)
      (3) Edmund Burke, excerpts from A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (CT, 299–306)

      Question: How is the pleasure that a reader may find in the lines of Virgil that Addison quotes in no. 418 (p. 287b) a “pleasure of the imagination”?

      Questions for discussion:
      1. According to Addison’s account in no. 409, what does it mean to have or to lack a “fine taste in writing”? Is the latter term equivalent to something like “literary predilection shared among polite persons,” or can its meaning be determined without reference to social class?
      2. How adequate an account of the pleasures of literary reading does Addison provide?
      3. What, according to Burke, is taste? How is the mental faculty of taste analogous to the bodily sense of the same name?
      4. Can a judgment of either bodily or mental taste be wrong, according to Burke’s account? If so, how? If not, then what is the sense of disputing such judgments?
      5. In what way are the pleasures of literary taste pleasures of the imagination for Burke?