"The Philosophical Biographer" shows how a shift in philosophical outlook in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-from an understanding of human knowledge rooted in deductive certainties to one resting on inductive probability-influenced the development of biographical narrative in general and in particular the way Johnson dealt with biographical evidence in his "Lives of the Poets."

Examining the psychological and philosophical doubt that lay at the heart of Johnson's character and intellect, Martin Maner reveals in the biographical studies of Savage, Swift, Milton, and Pope an...