Abstract

The dialogue again emerged as a central mode of philosophical and religious discourse at the beginning of the eighteenth century and was generally abandoned by major figures after Hume. My dissertation offers an account of this development, setting forth a history of the dialogue form and the various arguments used to sustain it during the eighteenth century. The major figures discussed are Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley, and Hume. ;The discussion identifies three main phases in the conception and actual composition of dialogue. Early in the period, the dialogue was equated with defenses of a philosophical Christianity. It enacted a formal theodicy: while accounting structurally for error, multiplicity, chance, and the like, it dramatized an ineluctable movement through reason towards consensus in the human realm and harmony in the divine. Later, this equation between mundane, inductive method and divine result comes under strain when writers such as Berkeley who employ dialogue as a vehicle of religious apologetics cannot fully govern the skeptical and inclusive elements of the genre. Finally, with Hume, the defense of dialogue as a mode of religious argument is appropriated to justify a work which confutes the very assumptions about induction, analogy, and inference which had sustained the religious dialogue. After Hume even defenders of dialogue must impose severe restrictions upon the kinds of topics discussed and the representation of character. ;Although several attempts have been made to catalog the number and type of dialogues written during these years, no study has yet described the larger role of dialogue within religious debate or explained why, for a relatively short period of time, the dialogue should have become so enormously popular, especially among the most significant philosophers. Such a project is significant for present literary scholarship because eighteenth-century discussions of dialogue offer an implicit explanation for the rise of prose fiction during the same period. In response to changing cultural and intellectual conditions, theorists of dialogue call for the realistic representation of complex characters, the development of plot and setting, and the abandonment of formal topics. They explain, in other words, why instruction must be mixed with entertainment and what particular difficulties this marriage creates for religious and philosophical argument.