Origins of British Enlightenment Rhetoric

2014 ◽  
pp. 522-534
Author(s):  
Arthur Walzer
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Traditional Theory ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
George Campbell ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
Literature History

British rhetorical theory in the eighteenth century departs from classical theory in significant ways. First, influenced by the empiricism of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and especially David Hume, Joseph Priestley and George Campbell recast traditional theory in psychological terms. Second, influenced by the belles lettres tradition, Adam Smith and Hugh Blair shift the focus of rhetoric from composition to criticism and create a theory intended to account for literature, history, philosophy, and oratory. Furthermore, in terms of rhetoric’s formative ideal, Quintilian’s ideal orator would share his place of privilege with the polite person of “taste” and “sensibility,” who would speak in a conversational register, as the coffeehouse emerged as a venue to rival the forum. Some scholars have welcomed these innovations; others have seen them as a radical wrong turn. This chapter discusses this transformation of rhetoric during the Enlightenment and reviews and attempts to resolve the scholarly debates the transformation has prompted.

Classical Liberalism

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Tomasi
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Classical Liberalism ◽  
Market Society ◽  
Economic Liberty ◽  
Service Programs ◽  
Revolutionary America

This chapter offers an intellectual history of liberalism, focusing on the classical view that was eventually displaced by modern, “high” liberalism. It first considers classical liberalism's notion of equality and property rights as well as economic liberty before discussing the ideas of thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, and F. A. Hayek. It then explores the emergence of market society, with particular emphasis on what Smith called “the system of natural liberty.” It also examines classical liberal ideas in action during under revolutionary America and concludes with an analysis of the essential features of classical liberalism: a thick conception of economic liberty grounded mainly in consequentialist considerations; a formal conception of equality that sees the outcome of free market exchanges as largely definitive of justice; and a limited but important state role in tax-funded education and social service programs.

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.

Enlightenment, Scottish

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Berry
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
William Robertson

This term refers to the intellectual movement in Scotland in roughly the second half of the eighteenth century. As a movement it included many theorists – the best known of whom are David Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid – who maintained both institutional and personal links with each other. It was not narrowly philosophical, although in the Common Sense School it did develop its own distinctive body of argument. Its most characteristic feature was the development of a wide-ranging social theory that included pioneering ‘sociological’ works by Adam Ferguson and John Millar, socio-cultural history by Henry Home (Lord Kames) and William Robertson as well as Hume’s Essays (1777) and Smith’s classic ‘economics’ text The Wealth of Nations (1776). All these works shared a commitment to ‘scientific’ causal explanation and sought, from the premise of the uniformity of human nature, to establish a history of social institutions in which the notion of a mode of subsistence played a key organising role. Typically of the Enlightenment as a whole this explanatory endeavour was not divorced from explicit evaluation. Though not uncritical of their own commercial society, the Scots were in no doubt as to the superiority of their own age compared to what had gone before.

scholarly journals Adam Smith El liberalismo económico

2021 ◽  
pp. 46-69
Author(s):  
Blanca Luz Rache de Camargo
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Thomas Hobbes

Inicio del liberalismo económico con sus primeros exponentes: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, y David Hume. Desarrollo del carácter científico de la economía mediante el pensamiento económico de Adam Smith, expuesto en sus dos grandes obras: Teoría de los sentimientos morales y Causa y naturaleza de la riqueza de las naciones.

Uniting Individualism and Statism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Deneen
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
National Government ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Local Institutions ◽  
Classical Liberalism ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Social Equality

This chapter examines the ways in which the individualist philosophy of classical liberalism and the statist philosophy of progressive liberalism reinforce each other. It begins with a discussion of the conflict between the “conservatives,” who advance the project of individual liberty and equality of opportunity especially through defense of a free and unfettered market, and the liberals, who aim at securing greater economic and social equality through extensive reliance upon the regulatory and judicial powers of the national government. The chapter shows how statism and individualism grow together while local institutions and respect for natural limits diminish, noting that, despite their differences, this ambition animated thinkers such as John Locke, John Dewey, Francis Bacon, Francis Bellamy, Adam Smith, and Richard Rorty.

THE LEVELLERS AND THE BIRTH OF LIBERAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 170-189
Author(s):  
James R. Otteson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The Core ◽  
Liberal Political Economy

AbstractWhen did liberal political theory, or perhaps liberal political economy, begin? Although many would trace their beginnings to the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume, or perhaps John Locke, in fact many of the propositions we today recognize as forming the core of liberalism were articulated in the first half of the seventeenth century by an unduly neglected group called the Levellers and their leader John Lilburne. In this essay, I first give some historical background and context to the Levellers and Lilburne. Next, I articulate several of their liberal positions, including freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of commerce and trade, and I examine their justifications for these positions, which I argue were both novel and radical. I conclude by exploring the contemporary relevance of the Levellers and argue that they should be considered as among liberalism’s most important founders.

scholarly journals A reconfiguração do empirismo: química, medicina e história natural a partir do programa baconiano de conhecimento

DoisPontos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luciana Zaterka
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
George Berkeley ◽  
Historia Natural

O conceito de empirismo evoca tanto uma tradição histórica quanto uma rede de questões filosóficas. Ambas frequentemente associadas a nomes como os de Francis Bacon (1561-1626), John Locke (1632-1704), George Berkeley (1685-1753) e David Hume (1711-1776). Porém, lembremos que nenhum desses filósofos utilizaram o termo empirismo, e nem compartilharam de uma única escola epistemológica. Do ponto de vista histórico é comum encontrarmos estudos de História e Filosofia da Ciência que relacionam o conceito de ‘empirismo’ com a chamada Escola Empírica Médica, desenvolvida na Grécia Antiga (século III a.C.). Porém, mais uma vez, temos que ter cautela com essas simplificações históricas, afinal se por uma Escola médica compreendemos um número de médicos que se reconhecem como pertencentes a um grupo que defendem exatamente as mesmas ideias e conceitos, a Escola Empírica Médica é simplesmente uma invenção histórica. De fato, observaremos alguns elementos comuns dentro dessas escolas, mas não correntes unívocas. Essa postura historiográfica usualmente acarreta sérias consequências. Assim, por exemplo, os estudos que marcam a diferença entre as filosofias do continente europeu e as da Inglaterra do século XVII, distinguindo-a por meio de noções amplas, tais como racionalismo e empirismo, podem cair em reducionismos importantes. Se, por um lado, vincular o empirismo moderno à escola médica antiga acarreta numa compreensão histórica equivocada; por outro lado, aceitar a dicotomia empirismo x racionalismo como a única narrativa possível para compreendermos a gênese da filosofia moderna carrega consigo problemas de cunho epistemológico. Dos vários problemas que surgem dessa perspectiva historiográfica, isto é, de aceitarmos acriticamente a narrativa padrão, dois deles nos importam mais de perto: ela fornece uma ênfase às questões de cunho epistemológico, subestimando, então, a importância dos debates em outras áreas, como filosofia natural, ética e política, por exemplo; e deixa de lado pensadores que combinam elementos das duas correntes e, portanto, não operam stricto sensu com a dicotomia entre razão e experiência. Nesse sentido, objetivamos problematizar e aprofundar essa questão, ao discutir aspectos epistêmicos e metodológicos do chamado “programa baconiano” de conhecimento, bem como alguns de seus desdobramentos, especialmente no âmbito da química e da medicina no século XVII inglês. 

Worldly Realism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pam Morris
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Epistemological Tradition ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Elizabeth Hamilton ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
Relationship Of

A preliminary discussion of Northanger Abbey and Jacob’s Room, foregrounds Austen’s and Woolf’s insistence upon non-heroic, unexceptional protagonists, the challenge their writing poses to existing genres and its disjunction from established, consensual interpretive systems. Jacques Ranciére’s concept of consensual and dissensual regimes of the perceptible, and recent accounts of the constitutive relationship of inanimate objects with self, provide a theoretical framework for discussing these experimental aspects of each writer’s work. The chapter maps an epistemological tradition linking these current perspectives to the Enlightenment empiricism of David Hume, Adam Smith, David Hartley, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Austen’s contemporary. The materialism of eighteenth-century thinkers constitutes the sceptical intellectual inheritance of Austen and Woolf. It underpins their development of worldly realism, an experimental writing practice, utilising innovative focalisation techniques to foreground relations of equality across the worlds of people, things and natural universe. Hence it constitutes a radical undermining of the idealist ideology of individualism.

An Age of Risk

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily C. Nacol
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Good Decision ◽  
For Profit ◽  
The Future ◽  
Prediction And Control

This book shows that risk, now treated as a permanent feature of our lives, did not always govern understandings of the future. Focusing on the epistemological, political, and economic writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, the book explains that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, political and economic thinkers reimagined the future as a terrain of risk, characterized by probabilistic calculation, prediction, and control. In these early modern sources, the book contends, we see three crucial developments in thought on risk and politics. While early modern thinkers differentiated uncertainty about the future from probabilistic calculations of risk, they remained attentive to the ways uncertainty and risk remained in a conceptual tangle, a problem that constrained good decision making. They developed sophisticated theories of trust and credit as crucial background conditions for prudent risk-taking, and offered complex depictions of the relationships and behaviors that would make risk-taking more palatable. They also developed two narratives that persist in subsequent accounts of risk—risk as a threat to security, and risk as an opportunity for profit. Looking at how these narratives are entwined in early modern thought, the book locates the origins of our own ambivalence about risk-taking. By the end of the eighteenth century, a new type of political actor would emerge from this ambivalence, one who approached risk with fear rather than hope. By placing a fresh lens on early modern writing, the book demonstrates how new and evolving orientations toward risk influenced approaches to politics and commerce that continue to this day.

Common Sense Rhetorical Theory, Pluralism, and Protestant Natural Law

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-228
Author(s):  
Rosaleen Keefe
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Hugh Blair ◽  
George Campbell ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Rhetorical Texts

This paper offers re-assessment of Scottish Common Sense rhetoric and its relationship to pluralist practice and philosophical method. It argues that the rhetorical texts of George Campbell, Hugh Blair, and Alexander Bain can be read as a practical application of Scottish Common Sense philosophy. This offers a novel means of examining the relationship that Scottish rhetoric has to the philosophy of David Hume and also its own innovative philosophy of language. Finally, I argue that Scottish rhetoric makes a unique contribution to rhetorical methodology's key place in the creation of social and moral consensus.

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