released 9/12/2024

Daniel E. Ritchie discusses the life and work of poet William Cowper (1731–1800), comparing his commitment to understanding reality through personal knowledge, intuition, and rigorous contemplation with the thought of Michael Polanyi. Ritchie examines Cowper’s critique of Enlightenment reason, which he saw as reductionist and unnaturally distanced from reality. He also talks about the poet’s severe mental health and spiritual struggles, his anti-slavery efforts, and why his poetry is neglected today, interspersing his comments with readings of some of Cowper’s verse.

43 minutes

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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.

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