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

This book discusses the intersection between philosophy and literature during the British Enlightenment.

Michael Prince (Author)

9780521021432, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 October 2005

300 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.451 kg

"[A] rich study."
International Journal of the Classical Tradition

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]