{"product_id":"scepticism-and-literature","title":"Scepticism and Literature","description":"\u003cp\u003e'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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Fred Parker","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43575138320445,"sku":"9780199253180","price":418.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/7689\/2989\/files\/9780199253180.jpg?v=1788557185","url":"https:\/\/www.palmleaf.com.au\/products\/scepticism-and-literature","provider":"Palmleaf","version":"1.0","type":"link"}