1. Life and times

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Berry
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
History Of Astronomy ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

There is more to Adam Smith than The Wealth of Nations, a book on the workings of the economy. He wrote an important treatise on moral philosophy, published an exceptionally well-informed history of astronomy, and was an author who cared about literary style and how to communicate both orally and in print. ‘Life and times’ provides a biographical outline from his birth in Kirkcaldy in 1723 to his student years at Glasgow University and Balliol College, Oxford, and his return to Glasgow University as the Professor of Logic in 1751. It also describes the sort of society in which Smith lived, with the backdrop of the 1707 Treaty of the Union and the Scottish Enlightenment.

Adam Smith: Moral and Political Philosophy

Philosophy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Technical Details ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
The University ◽  
The 19Th Century

Adam Smith (1723–1790) has become known as the father of economics. His reputation as the author of the Wealth of Nations has eclipsed his contributions to other areas of philosophy. Smith was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow and a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. His Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) was well-regarded at the time but faded from the philosophical canon in the 19th century and has only recently been subject to a revival of interest among philosophers. Smith’s thought was dismissed as moral psychology or as proto-utilitarian political economy until a revival in interest stemming largely from the publication of a critical edition of his works in the 1970s. Recent years have seen a renaissance in interest in Smith among moral philosophers. This has been accompanied by the first serious analysis of Smith’s thinking on rhetoric and the philosophy of science. This bibliography focuses on Smith’s moral and political philosophy. There is a very large literature on the technical details his economic theory and his contribution to the history of that discipline, but that will be mentioned here only when illuminating for discussions of his moral and political thinking.

PRACTICING PPE: THE CASE OF ADAM SMITH

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 277-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Patrick Hanley
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Pattern Detection ◽  
Knowledge Generation ◽  
Synthetic Approach ◽  
History Of Astronomy ◽  
Discrete Component ◽  
History Of ◽  
Point Of Reference

Abstract:Adam Smith has long been celebrated as a polymath, and his wide interests in and contributions to each of the discrete component fields of PPE have long been appreciated. Yet Smith deserves the attention of practitioners of PPE today not simply for his substantive insights, but for the ways in which his inquiries into these different fields were connected. Smith’s inquiry was distinguished by a synthetic approach to knowledge generation, and specifically to generating knowledge with applications exportable to other fields. Further, Smith’s investigations of various areas of study led him to recognize patterns in and across these fields, and his sensitivity to such patterns helped guide his inquiry and render it a connected enterprise. This paper examines several of Smith’s discrete inquiries in the history of astronomy, language, moral philosophy, and political economy, to show how he employed the techniques of pattern detection that he practiced in each of these inquiries to the task of generating new insights into new fields of inquiry. In so doing, Smith not only distinguished himself as an early practitioner of what we today identify with PPE, but he also provides a useful point of reference for those doing PPE today.

PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY AND THE SCIENCE OF MAN IN SCOTLAND: ADAM FERGUSON'S RESPONSE TO ROUSSEAU

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
IAIN MCDANIEL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Roman Republic ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The State ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
History Of

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality is now recognized to have played a fundamental role in the shaping of Scottish Enlightenment political thought. Yet despite some excellent studies of Rousseau's influence on Adam Smith, his impact on Smith's contemporary, Adam Ferguson, has not been examined in detail. This article reassesses Rousseau's legacy in eighteenth-century Scotland by focusing on Ferguson's critique of Rousseau in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), his History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783), and his lectures and published writings in moral philosophy. Ferguson's differences from Rousseau were more pronounced than is sometimes assumed. Not only did Ferguson offer one of the most substantial eighteenth-century refutations of the Genevan's thinking on sociability, nature, art, and culture, he also provided an alternative to the theoretical history of the state set out in the Discourse on Inequality.

scholarly journals Attitudes to Credit in Britain, 1680–1790

1990 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Hoppit
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Great Tradition ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Vast Range

The history of economic ideas in Britain is dominated by a great tradition which in its early stages focuses on Adam Smith. For the century before the publication of the Wealth of nations in 1776, economic ideas are most often studied in relation to the ‘arrival’ of Smith and commented on with regard to the degree to which they may be considered precursors of his ideas. Though this imposes a sense of order and establishes some principles with which to select from the vast range of economic writings, the dangers of certain whiggishness in this approach are readily apparent. Writers can appear to be winners or losers depending on the extent to which their ideas were denied, adapted or adopted by Smith and the other classical economists.1 Such problems have been acknowledged by many historians, not least by those who have fruitfully examined the political and philosophical bases of the emergence of political economy, particularly with regard to the Scottish enlightenment. Despite this, the force of the great tradition remains very strong. The authors and ideas that are examined are the ‘major’ ones, that is to say contributions that were, or attempted to be, either comprehensive or clearly attached to what, with hindsight, were the main strands of development. The emphasis has been upon theories or systematic explanations of the economic order. Not surprisingly the unsystematic and more casually formulated reflections of non-economists and ‘amateurs’, such as Defoe, are often swept under the carpet, even if their ideas on economic matters were more widely disseminated (and perhaps more influential) at the time. Consequently, our perception of economic ideas between the Restoration and the Wealth of nations continues to be highly and perhaps atypically selective.

Du «spectateur impartial» au «travailleur impartial», un commentaire sur la relation entre philosophie morale et économie politique chez Adam Smith selon Jean Mathiot

Dialogue ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilles Campagnolo
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The State ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Impartial Spectator ◽  
History Of ◽  
Économie Politique ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
The Church

ABSTRACT: As Smith freed moral philosophy from former control bodies (the Church, the state), the Scottish philosopher opened the field for a scientific political economy. In hisAdam Smith. Philosophie et économie(Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1990, p. 45), Jean Mathiot asked :«Should then one wonder that his [Smith’s] audacious stand became the historical grounding stone for political economy, then bringing recognition as an objectively-grounded field of knowledge?»Mathiot’s text and thought have been little debated to this day; this essay is meant to fill that gap, in particular with regard to the history of Smith’s reception in France. Mathiot sought to understand better the “impartial spectator” using a new character whom he claimed Smith was implicitly sketching, and whom he called “the impartial laborer”. To Mathiot’s mind, from theTheory of moral sentiments(1759) to theWealth of Nations(1776), the link is nothing else than Smith’s own philosophy.

Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.

The Early History of Financial Economics, 1478–1776. By Geoffrey Poitras. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2000. Pp. x, 522.

2002 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 268-269
Author(s):  
Larry Neal
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Financial Analysis ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Financial History ◽  
X 522 ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Simon Fraser University

Economic historians usually have to explain to their economist colleagues the difference between economic history, which focuses on facts, and history of economic thought, which focuses on ideas. Our colleagues in finance departments, typically fascinated by episodes in financial history treated by economic historians, are bound to be disappointed in the lack of attention given to the development of ideas in finance by historians of economic thought. Geoffrey Poitras, a professor of finance at Simon Fraser University, makes a valiant effort to remedy these oversights in his collection of vignettes that highlight the sophistication of financial instruments and analysts of financial markets well before the time of Adam Smith. Starting in 1478 with the publication of the Treviso Arithmetic, a typical textbook of commercial arithmetic for Italian merchants, and ending with brief snippets from the Wealth of Nations, Poitras treats the reader to a fascinating potpourri of excerpts from various manuals, brief biographies of pioneers in financial analysis, and historical discursions on foreign-exchange and stock markets.

Hume and Smith on Natural Religion

Philosophy ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Graham
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Psychology Of Religion ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe prominence of David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in contemporary philosophy of religion has led it to overshadow his other short work, The Natural History of Religion, and thus obscure the fact that the social psychology of religion was in many ways of greater interest and more widely debated among the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment than philosophical theology. This paper examines and compares the social psychology of religion advanced by Hume and Adam Smith. It argues that Hume's account of the psychological sources and social significance of religion is less satisfactory than Smith's.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 232-248
Author(s):  
James M. Vaughn
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Political History ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Ancient Regime ◽  
History Of ◽  
East And West ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

This chapter describes The Abbé Raynal's A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, one of the Enlightenment treatises that blazed like a comet across the night sky of the ancient régime. Widely translated and published, twenty official and fifty illegal editions produced between 1770 and 1796. While the Philosophical History was a bestseller throughout the Atlantic world, it was particularly widely discussed and debated in Britain and its empire. The work was the most detailed and critical examination to date of European overseas expansion, and it was avidly read in Britain—where it most famously influenced Adam Smith while he was in the final stages of composing An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

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