Wilde at Oxford: A Truce with Facts

Abstract

We are accustomed to thinking of Wilde as the enemy of facts and the champion of artifice. This essay challenges that assumption through an examination of his “Notebook on Philosophy,” which he kept between 1876 and 1878 while studying for his examinations at Oxford. In this document, he construes the production of facts as a source of creative vitality, rather than the purview of instrumental thinking alone. Wilde celebrates data that cannot be easily assimilated to existing systems or methods, drawing in particular on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Sir Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum in exploring these possibilities. The notebook thus reveals a surprising alignment between Wilde’s playful irreverence and the empirical tradition.