Postmodern thinkers have demonstrated the fragmentation of the Enlightenment understanding of the self, society, and nature; for many, however, the postmodern alternatives–the pursuit of individual self-definition, utter skepticism regarding the relation between language and reality, or the embrace of ideological power–are unconvincing. In The Fullness of Knowing, by placing the most promising postmodern insights in dialogue with eighteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment, Daniel Ritchie argues that we can begin to overcome post-Enlightenment fragmentation without abandoning either coherence (as many postmoderns have done) or the valid insights of modern and postmodern thought (as many traditionalists have done).
Table of Content
Acknowledgements
Introduction: ‘All Is Trash that Reason Cannot Reach’: Unenlightened Writers and the Postmodern World
Chapter One: Learning to Read, Learning to Listen in Robinson Crusoe
Chapter Two: The Hymns of Isaac Watts and Postmodern Worship: Aesthetic Knowledge as a Response to the Enlightenment Critique of Religion
Chapter Three: Jonathan Swift’s Information Machine and the Critique of Technology
Chapter Four: Christopher Smart’s Poetry and the Dialogue between Science and Theology
Chapter Five: Festival and Discipline in Revolutionary France and Postmodern Times
Chapter Six: Remembering Things Past: Tradition as a Way of Knowing in Edmund Burke and Hans-Georg Gadamer
Chapter Seven: Reconciling the Heart with the Head: The Poetry of William Cowper and the Thought of Michael Polanyi
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the author
Daniel E. Ritchie is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Humanities Program at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of Reconstructing Literature in an Ideological Age: A Biblical Poetics and Literary Studies from Milton to Burke, and the editor of two collections on Edmund Burke: Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Edmund Burke: Appraisals and Applications. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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