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Samuel Johnson, Scepticism, and Biography
- Biography
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 12, Number 4, Fall 1989
- pp. 302-319
- 10.1353/bio.2010.0544
- Article
- Additional Information
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Johnson's sceptical approach to biography is a dialectic by which Johnson engages the reader in testing the limits of biographical inference. This biographical scepticism derives from the scientific epistemologies of Locke and Bacon, the writings of Pierre Bayle, and the "constructive scepticism" of the seventeenth-century Christian apologists.