15: A preliminary discourse on philosophy and literature
SeriesThe Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780
Volume 1The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780
Chapter Title 15: A preliminary discourse on philosophy and literature
Publication Date2005
AuthorMichael B. Prince
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)10.1017/CHOL9780521781442.017
Overview
Introduction
Any attempt to limit the topic of philosophy and literature to a subset of the material that might be considered under that heading immediately replicates the theoretical conundrum that brought philosophy and literature into close proximity from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth century: the existing data exceed the frame of the genre appropriate to the occasion, in much the same way that, at the time, a scientific standard of empirical precision and comprehensiveness threatened the bounds of existing forms of philosophical writing and received accounts of ultimate order and design. Eighteenth-century writers confronted a seemingly inevitable implication of the scientific outlook, namely, that the range of empirical data about natural and moral topics is so vast that any assembly of available information constitutes a selective interpretation, or, when the point was pressed, as it often was by the likes of Hume, a fiction.
Between 1660 and 1800, writers across a wide spectrum of philosophical and literary activity were keenly aware of this problem. ‘In the prosecution of a design so extensive’, writes George Campbell at the beginning of his magnum opus The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776), ‘there are two extremes to be shunned. One is too much abstraction in investigating causes; the other, too much minuteness in specifying effects. By the first, the perspicuity of a performance may be endangered; by the second, its dignity may be sacrificed.’ Although we tend to hear the bowing and scraping of a neoclassicist gesturing towards the via media, eighteenth-century philosophers after Locke could not avoid encountering the dialectic between perspicuity and dignity on the cognitive or theoretical level.
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How to cite (Modern Language Association style)
Prince, Michael B. "A preliminary discourse on philosophy and literature." The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780. Ed. John Richetti. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Cambridge Histories Online. Cambridge University Press. 22 November 2009 DOI:10.1017/CHOL9780521781442.017
