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5 - ‘Interrogative’ Philosophizing and the Ambiguities of Egalitarian Dialogues: Sir Richard Phillips's Four Dialogues between an Oxford Tutor and a Disciple of the Common-Sense Philosophy (1824) and Robert Southey's Sir Thomas More: Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829)

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Summary

For Hume, Berkeley and Price, the persuasiveness of dialogue offered a compelling format within which to couch their philosophical agendas and refute criticisms made against previous exhortations. But dialogue, as Plato, Shaftesbury and more recently Putnam and Myerson have noted, is an integral part of the processes associated with ‘rationalism’ and philosophizing as intellectual processes in their own right. In other words, dialogue is not only ideally suited to the task of persuading someone of the validity of a philosophical position, but is an integral part of rationality, the testing of competing claims to truth, and ultimately, philosophical discovery and the aggregation of knowledge – processes which form the bedrock, Gidden argues, for ‘democratic education’, ‘enlightened citizenry’ and democracy itself. The Romantic period witnessed a resurgence in this latter mode of dialogizing in the 1820s, a development which is not only highly relevant to our understanding of the evolution of the dialogue genre and its engagement with the ‘new hobby of education’, but raises crucially important questions about philosophizing itself, the increasing sophistication and critical acuity of reading audiences, the communicability of ideas, and the viability of dialogic mentoring as a literary technique. This chapter seeks to address such issues by examining in detail Sir Richard Phillips's Four Dialogues between an Oxford Tutor and a Disciple of the Common-Sense Philosophy, Relative to the Proximate Causes of Material Phenomena (1824) and Robert Southey's Sir Thomas More: Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829).

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Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of Dispute
Literary Dialogues in the Age of Revolution
, pp. 155 - 186
Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

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