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基本説明
A wide-ranging study, highlighting the centrality of 'sceptical thinking' in the most innovative writings of the eighteenth century, and offering a new way of relating the literature and philosophy of the period.
Full Description
'The more we enquire, the less we can resolve,' wrote Johnson. Scepticism-a reasoned emphasis on the severe limitations of rationality-would seem to undermine the grounds of belief and action. But in some of the best eighteenth-century literature, a theoretically paralysing critique of the pretensions of reason, precept, and language went hand in hand with a vigorous intellectual, moral, and linguistic confidence. To realise philosophical scepticism as literature was effectively to transform it. Dr Parker traces the presence of this life-giving irony in works by Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson, relates it more broadly to the social self-consciousness of eighteenth-century culture, and discusses its source in Locke and its inspiration in Montaigne. The argument serves as a reminder that radical scepticism is not the invention of the late twentieth century, and that its strategies and implications have never been more interestingly explored than in the eighteenth.
Contents
Preface ; List of abbreviations ; 1. Rational ignorance and sceptical thinking ; 2. Sceptical tendencies in Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding ; 3. 'Sworn to no Master': Pope's scepticism in the Epistle to Bolingbroke and An Essay on Man ; 4. Innocence and simulation in the scepticism of Hume ; 5. Tristram Shandy: singularity and the single life ; 6. Johnson's conclusiveness ; Index