Charles O’Conor of Belanagare and Thomas Leland’s ‘philosophical’ history of Ireland

1962 ◽  
Vol 13 (49) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter D. Love
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
History Of

‘But the Irish have no philosophical historian’ was the taunt of David Hume, and so of course enlightened Irishmen of the eighteenth century were determined to have one. A great European audience awaited any thoughtful, elegant and dignified history like Hume’s of England andRobertson’s of Scotland. An indispensable mark of the ‘philosophical historian’ was that he could rise above religious partisanship, as Hume, Voltaire, and Robertson seemed to do; but for eighteenth-century Irishmen this required an enormous effort of mind and feeling—Irish society was still drastically rent by its religious antagonisms. Protestants wrote histories that were alive with catholic rebellions and massacres; they justified the penal laws as necessary protection against an unforgivably and ineradicably rebellious people. Catholics wrote histories to protest against the penal laws; they laboured to show that the rebellions and massacres were really provoked by protestants and that most past troubles were caused either by the protestants themselves or by the unfortunate division of the country, by law, into two hostile bodies.

Moral canals: trust and social capital in the work of Hume, Smith and Genovesi

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigino Bruni ◽  
Robert Sugden
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Economic Agents ◽  
Trading Partners ◽  
History Of

It is a truism that a market economy cannot function without trust. We must be able to rely on other people to respect our property rights, and on our trading partners to keep their promises. The theory of economics is incomplete unless it can explain why economic agents often trust one another, and why that trust is often repaid. There is a long history of work in economics and philosophy which tries to explain the kinds of reasoning that people use when they engage in practices of trust: this work develops theories of trust. A related tradition in economics, sociology and political science investigates the kinds of social institution that reproduce whatever habits, dispositions or modes of reasoning are involved in acts of trust: this work develops theories of social capital. A recurring question in these literatures is whether a society which organizes its economic life through markets is capable of reproducing the trust on which those markets depend. In this paper, we look at these themes in relation to the writings of three eighteenth-century philosopher-economists: David Hume, Adam Smith, and Antonio Genovesi.

scholarly journals Emotions vocabulary and the reconceptualisation of emotions in Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents”

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Elena D. Andonova-Kalapsazova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of

The article undertakes the analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) from a history of literary emotions perspective which, I argue, yields insights into the attitudes towards emotions embedded in Radcliffe’s works. A reading of the novel from such a perspective also complements the critical studies of the artist’s engaging with the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The novel is read as a text that registered but also participated in the dissemination of an epistemology of emotional experience articulated in the idiom of eighteenth-century moral philosophers – Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith - at the same time as it retained some of the older, theology-based conceptions of passions and affections. The dynamic in which the two frameworks for understanding the emotions exist in the novel is explored through a close reading of the vocabulary in which Radcliffe rendered the emotional experiences of her fictional characters. In this reading it is the passions which are found to have been invested with a variety of meanings and attributed a range of moral valences that most noticeably foreground the movement from a generally negative towards a more complex appreciation of powerful emotions.

History of Religion as Critique of Religion?

2021 ◽  
pp. 10-30
Author(s):  
Hans Joas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Universal History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
History Of

The Scottish eighteenth-century philosopher and historian David Hume can be considered a pioneer of the “natural history of religion” in the sense of a universal history of religion that is not based on theological presuppositions. This chapter offers a characterization of his methodological achievements and a reevaluation of his empirical claims concerning monotheism, polytheism, religion and tolerance. It also interprets the German reception of Hume in Herder and other eighteenth-century thinkers as a serious critical continuation that is free from Hume’s anti-Christian motives. This continuation opens the perspective of a serious study of the literary character of religious texts, in this case of the Bible. All simple contrasts between Enlightenment and religion are overcome as soon as we take this interaction of thinkers into account.

Commerce, Virtue, and Politics: Adam Ferguson's Constitutionalism

1983 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary L. McDowell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Philosophers

Adam Ferguson was one of several moral philosophers who contributed to the Scottish Enlightenment, a period aptly described as one of “remarkable efflorescence.” The works of Ferguson and his fellow Scotsmen — Adam Smith, David Hume, Dugald Stewart, Lord Kames, Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid — were widely distributed, seriously read, and vigorously debated during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The greatest contribution of this Scottish school to the history of political thinking was the refinement of the idea of commercial republicanism, the synthesis of modern notions of polity and economy.

scholarly journals Philosophical Solitude: David Hume versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau

2020 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Barbara Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Creative Mind ◽  
History Of ◽  
Personal Career ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract The philosopher meditating alone in his study is a cliché of western culture. But behind the hackneyed image lies a long history of controversy. Was solitude the ‘palace of learning’ that many learned people, religious and secular, perceived it, or a debilitating state of solipsistic misery and intellectual degeneracy, as its enemies described it? In the mid eighteenth century the debate became fiercely personal during a public quarrel between two philosophical luminaries: David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the 1760s Rousseau faced persecution from state and church authorities in France and Switzerland. Hume gave him refuge in England. The relationship rapidly turned toxic as the convivial Hume sought to manage his notoriously reclusive charge. Solitude became a casus belli in a war of words that fascinated intellectual Europe. But the fracas was more complex than it appeared. Who are we with, when we are alone? For Hume, no less than Rousseau, the question proved inescapable, in both his personal career and his philosophy. A closer look at two thinkers who, on the surface, were a study in opposites, reveals much about the vicissitudes of solitude in the life of the creative mind.

scholarly journals CONVERGENCE AND CONFLICT IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 1039-1063 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACQUELINE HILL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
History Of

Recent writing shows that eighteenth-century Irish society was both less and more divided than was supposed by Lecky, whose History of Ireland in the eighteenth century (now over a century old) dominated so much subsequent historiography. Because Lecky enjoyed access to records that were subsequently destroyed his work will never be entirely redundant, but this article looks at ways in which his views have been and continue to be modified. It surveys the various interpretative models now being used to open up the period, which invite comparisons not merely with England, Scotland, Wales, and colonial America but also with Europe. It also considers how that endlessly fascinating decade, the 1790s, has emerged from the spotlight turned on it by a plethora of bicentenary studies.

Emotions, philosophy of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Solomon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Working Together ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
The Right

Emotions have always played a role in philosophy, even if philosophers have usually denied them centre stage. Because philosophy has so often been described as first and foremost a discipline of reason, the emotions have often been neglected or attacked as primitive, dangerous or irrational. Socrates reprimanded his pupil Crito, advising that we should not give in to our emotions, and some of the ancient Stoic philosophers urged a life of reason free from the enslavement of the emotions, a life of apatheia (apathy). In Buddhism, too, much attention has been given to the emotions, which are treated as ‘agitations’ or klesas. Buddhist ‘liberation’, like the Stoic apatheia, becomes a philosophical ideal, freedom from the emotions. Philosophers have not always downgraded the emotions, however. Aristotle defended the view that human beings are essentially rational animals, but he also stressed the importance of having the right emotions. David Hume, the eighteenth-century empiricist, insisted that ‘reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions’. In the nineteenth century, although Hegel described the history of philosophy as the development of reason he also argued that ‘nothing great is ever done without passion’. Much of the history of philosophy can be told in terms of the shifting relationship between the emotions (or ‘passions’) and reason, which are often at odds, at times seem to be at war, but ideally should be in harmony. Thus Plato painted a picture of the soul as a chariot with three horses, reason leading the appetites and ‘the spirited part’, working together. Nietzsche, at the end of the nineteenth century, suggested that ‘every passion contains its own quantum of reason’. Nietzsche’s suggestion, that emotion and reason are not really opposites but complementary or commingled, has been at the heart of much of the debate about emotions since ancient times. Are emotions intelligent, or are they simply physical reactions? Are they mere ‘feelings’, or do they play a vital role in philosophy and in our lives?

Ferguson, Adam (1723–1815)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kettler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
History Of

Rarely mentioned by philosophers except as companion of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson contributed a political consciousness to the moral philosophy of eighteenth-century Scotland. In An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Ferguson used a comparative method to reflect on a commercial society distinguished by refined division of labour and to caution against its political dangers. With his intentionally elevated rhetoric he sought to counter his philosophical contemporaries’ analytical aloofness from the negative effects of the civility, commerce, security and critical philosophy they prized. Ferguson’s textbooks and Roman history deserve philosophical attention for their help with interpreting his distinctive social diagnosis of the liberal political constitution.

Reviews: The Cruelty Man: Child Welfare, the NSPCC and the State in Ireland, 1889–1956, Cavan History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County, Aspects of Irish Aristocratic Life: Essays on the FitzGeralds and Carton House, Irish Demesne Landscapes, 1660–1740, The Protestant Community in Ulster, 1825–45: A Society in Transition, A Formative Decade: Ireland in the 1920s, Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory, Death and Dying in Ireland, Britain and Europe: Historical Perspectives, Irish Women in Medicine, c.1880s–1920s: Origins, Education and Careers, Ireland, the United Nations and the Congo, Ireland, Africa and the End of Empire, The Last Cavalier: Richard Talbot (1631–91), Children, Childhood and Irish Society 1500 to the Present, Clerical and Learned Lineages of Medieval Co. Clare: A Survey of the Fifteenth-Century Papal Registers, Nathaniel Clements, 1705–77: Politics, Fashion and Architecture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Reforming Food in Post-Famine Ireland: Medicine, Science and Improvement, 1845–1922, Mayo History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County, The Welsh and the Shaping of Early Modern Ireland, Irish Agriculture Nationalised: The Dairy Disposal Company and the Making of the Modern Irish Dairy Industry, Revisionist Scholarship and Modern Irish Politics, The Life and Times of Sir Frederick Hamilton, 1590–1647

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-195
Author(s):  
Fiachra Byrne ◽  
P. J. Duffy ◽  
Christine Casey ◽  
Rolf Loeber ◽  
James Kelly ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Death And Dying ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
History Of

Macroeconomic Conversion Déjà Vu

1995 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-85
Author(s):  
Hans Brems
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Macroeconomic Theory ◽  
Milton Friedman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Deja Vu ◽  
Déjà Vu ◽  
Physical Output

Scope. Macroeconomic theory determines either an unemployment equilibrium or an inflation equilibrium. Consider an economy producing a single good. Unemployment theory determines the physical output of that good; inflation theory determines its price. Twice in the history of economic thought an unemployment equilibrium reversed itself into an inflation equilibrium. First, in the eighteenth century the unemployment equilibrium of William Petty (1662) and A. Yarranton (1677) reversed itself into the inflation equilibrium of David Hume (1752) and A. R. J. Turgot (1769–1770). Second, in our own century the unemployment equilibrium of J. M. Keynes (1936) reversed itself into the inflation equilibrium of Milton Friedman (1968).

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