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Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics and the Novel (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought)

Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics and the Novel (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought)

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Michael Prince
Cambridge University Press, 1/16/1997
EAN 9780521550628, ISBN10: 0521550629

Hardcover, 300 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English

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.

Introduction
dialogue and Enlightenment
Part I. Strains of Enlightenment
1. Shaftesbury's characteristic genres
concepts of criticism in the early eighteenth century
2. Shaftesbury's The Moralists
a dialogue upon dialogue
3. Berkeley and the paradoxes of empiricism
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
4. Berkeley's Alciphron, or the Christian Cicero
5. Hume and the end of religious dialogue
Dialogues concerning Natural Religion
Part II. Dialogue, Aesthetics and the Novel
6. The Platonic revival
1740–70
7. Anti-Platonism and the novelistic character
8. Dead conversations
Richard Hurd's late poetics of dialogue
9. Utopia or conversation
transforming dialogue in Johnson and Austen
Epilogue
some dialectics of Enlightenment.