released 9/1/2010

English professor Daniel Ritchie describes how many of the figures he studies in his new book, including Jonathan Swift and Isaac Watts, emphasize the significance of human experience, enculturation, and contingency to human knowledge; in contrast to this appreciation of the humanity of knowledge, Ritchie observes that many of the figures of the Enlightenment idealized a non-contingent, machine-like knowledge that could be completely divorced from particular human situatedness. Jonathan Swift illustrates the contrasts between these two approaches in parts of his satirical Gulliver’s Travels and in a number of his essays at the beginnings of the Enlightenment. Swift was responding to the major discussions of the time where contemporary and ancient times were being compared. Isaac Watts was likewise aware of the intellectual currents of the day, and he engaged contemporary discussions in both prose and verse. He was highly critical of the divorce between beauty and knowing that figures such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant later would claim. Ritchie is the author of The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Post Modernity from Defoe to Gadamer.

21 minutes

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