Samuel Johnson as Moralist

Abstract

The well known English writer Samuel Johnson† lived in the age of Enlightenment when philosophy, understood as the critical activity of the mind, extended its influence to all types of moral and mental activity and occupied the minds of the poet and the dramatist, the artist and the scientist, the pedagogue and the social activist. Both by virtue of the multiplicity of his interests and the circumstances of his life, Johnson was unable to devote himself entirely to philosophy. But, being an encyclopedically educated man, he constantly lived by it and thought about the world around him in a philosophical way. His arguments, which had a philosophical character, were linked with practical precepts of actual life or passed into them. He was concerned not only with the abstract truthfulness of his writings, but also with their immediate utility for his fellow creatures. Human life is the main subject matter of his philosophy, and philosophy was understood by him as the quintessence of life and its vital wisdom...