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Genre/Form: | Electronic books Criticism, interpretation, etc |
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Additional Physical Format: | Print version: Lerner, Ralph. Playing the fool. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, ©2009 (DLC) 2008051926 (OCoLC)281091955 |
Named Person: | Thomas More, Saint; Francis Bacon; Robert Burton; Pierre Bayle; Benjamin Franklin; Edward Gibbon; Francis Bacon; Pierre Bayle; Robert Burton; Benjamin Franklin; Edward Gibbon; Thomas More, Saint |
Material Type: | Document, Internet resource |
Document Type: | Internet Resource, Computer File |
All Authors / Contributors: |
Ralph Lerner |
ISBN: | 9780226473178 0226473171 1282426664 9781282426665 9786612426667 6612426667 |
OCLC Number: | 475007593 |
Language Note: | English. |
Description: | 1 online resource (134 pages) |
Contents: | Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1 Tomfoolery in Earnest; 2 The Jihad of St. Alban; 3 Burton's Antics; 4 Remedial Education in Professor Bayle's History Class; 5 Franklin's Double Take on Rights; 6 The Smile of a Philosophic Historian; Index of Names. |
Responsibility: | Ralph Lerner. |
More information: |
Abstract:
Writers and thinkers throughout history have adopted the fool's approach. This title discusses six of them - Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Pierre Bayle, Benjamin Franklin, and Edward Gibbon - to elucidate the strategies these men employed to persuade the heedless, the zealous, and the overly confident to pause and reconsider.
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Publisher Synopsis
"Reading this book is a continuous pleasure. Ralph Lerner expounds his chosen texts with genuine skill, delicacy, and a rare ear for shadings of tone. His prose is at once accomplished and self-effacing, leaving us with the impression of a second voice on the scene - one of the same family as the authors he comments on, all of whom deployed an oblique style, an ambiguous genre, or a mode of impersonation that resists the direct disclosure of doctrine, always for the purpose of insinuating doubts and scruples." - David Bromwich, Yale University" Read more...

