Reading: Matthew Arnold, excerpts (CT, 586–607):
        (1) “Preface to the 1853 Edition of Poems”
        (2) The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
        (3) Excerpt from The Study of Poetry

       Question: Arnold recommends a “rule” for English criticism that he sums up in the word “disinterestedness” (597a). What does it mean for criticism to adhere to this rule?

       Note: For what guidance it may offer, I here quote a paragraph from my own publication “The Concept of Disinterestedness in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics” (Journal of the History of Philosophy, January, 2002):

        There are, so far as I am aware, three distinct senses in which the word “disinterested” is used outside of philosophy. (1) Frequently, indeed perhaps more often than not these days, it carries the sense of “uninterested.” Such a use of the word, for all the disgust and distress that it causes to the verbally discriminating, is in fact the oldest. It was, however, recessive during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, so far as I am aware, never appears in the writings of any of the authors under consideration here. (2) When applied to such substantives as “judgment,” “inquiry,” “evaluation,” and the like, “disinterested” has the sense of “impartial,” or, as the Oxford English Dictionary aptly glosses it, “unbiased by personal interest.” (3) Applied to human actions, dispositions, and emotions, “disinterested” has the sense of “uninfluenced by self-interest,” or, to quote some dictionaries, “free from self-seeking,” “free from selfish motive,” or “superior to regard of private advantage.”