The Fullness of Knowing

Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer

Daniel E. Ritchie

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781602583313, 9781932792171
• eBook ISBN: 9781602585010
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

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 contents

• Cover
• Half Title, Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Unenlightened Writers and the Postmodern World
• 1. Learning to Read, Learning to Listen in Robinson Crusoe
• 2. The Hymns of Isaac Watts and Postmodern Worship
• 3. Jonathan Swift’s Information Machine and the Critique of Technology
• 4. Christopher Smart’s Poetry and the Dialogue between Science and Theology
• 5. Festival and Discipline in Revolutionary France and Postmodern Times
• 6. Tradition as a Way of Knowing in Edmund Burke and Hans-Georg Gadamer
• 7. Reconciling the Heart with the Head in the Poetry of William Cowper and the Thought of Michael Polanyi
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index