Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics and the Novel

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Cambridge University Press, 1996 - 282 pages
This book offers the first full-length study of philosophical dialogue during the English Enlightenment. It explains why important philosophers - Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley and Hume - and innumerable minor translators, imitators and critics wrote in and about dialogue during the eighteenth century; and why, after Hume, philosophical dialogue either falls out of use or undergoes radical transformation. Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment describes the extended, heavily coded, and often belligerent debate about the nature and proper management of dialogue; and it shows how the writing of philosophical fictions relates to the rise of the novel and the emergence of philosophical aesthetics. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history.
 

Contents

dialogue and Enlightenment
1
STRAINS OF ENLIGHTENMENT
21
a dialogue upon dialogue
47
A Treatise concerning
74
Dialogues concerning
136
DIALOGUE AESTHETICS AND THE NOVEL
144
17301770
163
AntiPlatonism and the novelistic character
190
Richard Hurds late poetics of dialogue
213
transforming dialogue in Johnson
229
a critique
251
Select bibliography
267
Index
277
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