Montaigne on Empathy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Bakewell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ethical Behavior ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Natural Inclination

Montaigne’s essay “Of cruelty” explores a phenomenon we would now call empathy, or the ability to “feel into” or share another’s sufferings or pleasures: an experience Montaigne tells us he frequently has himself, even with nonhuman animals. He raises the question of how sympathetic tendencies of this kind can be considered morally virtuous when they spring from natural inclination rather than reason. His treatment of the topic anticipates eighteenth-century texts on sympathy by David Hume and Adam Smith, as well as modern research in psychology and neuroscience. This article examines these connections, and also sets Montaigne’s remarks on empathy into the context of other aspects of his work, suggesting that his approach may offer a foundation for a more subtle understanding of empathy’s role in ethical behavior.

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.

Philosophy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Contents

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

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.

The Hobbesian Hypothesis in Eighteenth-Century Political Theory

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Widerquist ◽  
Grant S. McCall
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Property System

This chapter shows how “the Hobbesian hypothesis” (the claim that everyone is better off in a state society with a private property system than they could reasonably expect to be in any society without either of those institutions) appeared in Eighteenth-Century political theory. It shows how disagreement about the truth of the hypothesis produced virtually no debate. David Hume, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and others asserted its supposedly obvious truth without providing evidence. Lord Shaftesbury, the Baron de Montesquieu, and Thomas Paine voiced scepticism but also provided little evidence. Others, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau talked about similar issues without clearly taking a position on the hypothesis.

Adam Ferguson as a Moral Philosopher

Philosophy ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Graham
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Moral Philosopher ◽  
Moral Science ◽  
Applied Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Ethics

AbstractAdam Ferguson has received little of the renewed attention that contemporary philosophers have given to the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, most notably David Hume, Thomas Reid and Adam Smith. There are good reasons for this difference. Yet, the conception of moral philosophy at work in Ferguson's writings can nevertheless be called upon to throw important critical light on the current enthusiasm for philosophical ethics and applied philosophy. Eighteenth century ‘moral science’ took its significance from a context that modern philosophers who seek to be practically ‘relevant’ need, but lack.

‘Utility’ and the ‘Utility Principle’: Hume, Smith, Bentham, Mill

Utilitas ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas G. Long
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Liberal Tradition

David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are often viewed as contributors to or participants in a common tradition of thought roughly characterized as ‘the liberal tradition’ or the tradition of ‘bourgeois ideology’. This view, however useful it may be for polemical or proselytizing purposes, is in some important respects historiographically unsound. This is not to deny the importance of asking what twentieth-century liberals or conservatives might find in the works of, say, David Hume to support their respective ideological persuasions. It is only to insist that attempts to use selected arguments, or parts of arguments, from great eighteenth-century thinkers to shore up twentieth-century programmatic political positions must be categorically distinguished from attempts to understand what Hume, Smith, Bentham or Mill actually meant, or could imaginably have meant, to say.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Douglas A. Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Trade ◽  
World Trade Organization ◽  
Environmental Regulation ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
World Trade ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Adverse Impact ◽  
The World

This chapter provides a background on why free trade is considered to be a desirable policy. It explains whether the most frequently made criticisms of free trade, such as its adverse impact on workers and the environment, have merit. It discusses what is the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as how world trade rules erode a country's sovereignty and undermine its health and environmental regulation. The chapter also introduces basic economic principles and empirical evidence regarding international trade and trade policy. It mentions the perspective on free trade that was originally developed by David Hume and Adam Smith in eighteenth-century Scotland.

Sentiments

2020 ◽  
pp. 275-306
Author(s):  
Michael Spitzer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The Self ◽  
Emotional Suffering ◽  
Classical Style ◽  
Philosophical Writings

This chapter reinterprets the Classical style in terms of eighteenth-century theories of sentiment, largely shaped by the novels of Richardson and Sterne, and the philosophical writings of David Hume and Adam Smith. Hume’s distinction between passion and feeling sharpens the focus on the quality, or phenomenology, of emotions: on what emotions actually feel like, and for whom. In this light, emotion is predicated on the idea of the self as an empty placeholder, filled by a stream of impressions and ideas. These ideas help cast new light on the sentimental emotions of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. The chapter also reviews shifting models of “emotional suffering” (after Reddy), including notions of madness, cruelty, and the violence of glory in Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony.

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