The Progress of Feeling: The Ossian Poems and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
JoEllen DeLucia
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Social Development ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theory Of Moral Sentiments

This chapter examines the relationship between time, feeling, and gender in two foundational texts of the Scottish Enlightenment, the Ossian poems and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. It contends that Macpherson and Smith created a temporal map of emotion that gauged social development from “primitive” to “developed” cultures and offered women writers and Scottish philosophers a new field upon which they could experiment with the relationship between gender and historical progress. Despite their obvious differences, Macpherson and Smith used women’s social status and the feminine values they were thought to impart to their male counterparts as tools for charting, evaluating, and questioning emerging theories of historical change. The ambiguity surrounding feminine sentiments’ placement in these Scottish Enlightenment narratives of historical progress creates the foundation for the following chapters, which trace women writers’ engagement with the theories of feeling and historical progress articulated by these two influential writers.

Introduction: A Feminine Enlightenment?

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
JoEllen DeLucia
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The Subject ◽  
First And Second Generation

Recent scholarship on the role emotion and sympathy played in the Enlightenment’s mapping of historical progress invites a reconsideration of the women writers who are the subject of this book: Mary Wollstonecraft’s contemporaries, including first- and second-generation Bluestockings and gothic and historical novelists, who are often placed outside a feminist literary tradition because of their endorsement of the feminine and refined emotions she critiques in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The mid-eighteenth-century explosion of literary, philosophical, and historical narratives that theorized what Scottish Enlightenment philosophers called “the progress of the female sex” not only made gender central to understandings of the civilizing process, but was also shaped by the work of these writers. A Feminine Enlightenment places this argument in conversation with recent work by J.G.A. Pocock and others on multiple Enlightenments, literary scholars on the Scottish Enlightenment, and feminist critics on women writers’ responses to Enlightenment.

scholarly journals SOBRE A FILOSOFIA MORAL DE ADAM SMITH

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (111) ◽  
pp. 57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugo E. A. da Gama Cerqueira
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Impartial Spectator ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theory Of Moral Sentiments

Este artigo discute a Teoria dos sentimentos morais de Adam Smith. O argumento central do texto é apresentado, tomando por base o contexto proporcionado pela filosofia moral do Iluminismo escocês. Os conceitos de simpatia e espectador imparcial são discutidos, apontando-se a maneira original como Smith concebe a relação entre a moralidade e a sociabilidade.Abstract: This article examines Adam Smith’s Theory of moral sentiments. The moral philosophy of the Scottish enlightenment is central to the argumentation developed in this paper which analyses the concepts of “sympathy” and of “impartial spectator” and points to the originality of Smith’s argument regarding the relationship between morality and sociality.

scholarly journals Nature, Knowledge, and Civilisation. Connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds in the Enlightenment

Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Australian Aborigines ◽  
Black Africans ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Relationship

A central feature of Scottish Enlightenment thought was the emergence of stadial or “conjectural” theories of history, in which the development of all human societies, from those in Europe, to the Seminole Indians in Florida and the Tongans of the South Pacific, could be understood and compared according to the same universal historical criteria. This paper argues that central to this tradition was an account of the relationship between “useful knowledge” and social development. This article argues that we can map the circulation of a discourse about useful knowledge, nature, and civilisation through a network of Scottish-trained physicians and naturalists that spread to the Atlantic and to the Pacific. In the Atlantic world, physicians and naturalists used the vocabulary and categories of stadial theory to classify indigenous societies: they made comparisons between the illnesses that they thought “naturally” afflicted savage cultures, as opposed to those of civilized Europeans. In the Pacific, the Edinburgh-trained surgeons and naturalists compared Tahitians, Maoris, and Australian Aborigines to black Africans and Europeans, and they commented on the presence or absence of useful knowledge as a marker of the degree of development of each civilisation.

From Parnassus to Bayreuth: Staging a Music which is Not One

2020 ◽  
pp. 183-221
Author(s):  
Sarah Hickmott
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Symbolic Language ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Music And Gender ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

The final chapter brings together all three thinkers and demonstrates the way in which they all – albeit in different ways – inherit and deploy aspects of a Romantic and idealist conception of music. It considers their writings on Wagner in order to ascertain more clearly how their different positions play out over a shared question: to what extent is Wagner’s music fascist or anti-Semitic? Rather than seek to solve this problem, the chapter argues that their positions on this question relate to their a priori understanding of the relationship between music and philosophy, their broader political-philosophical commitments, and their characterization of what is ‘essentially’ musical. The chapter also draws on Irigaray’s work in order to show how both Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe reinstate a gendered foundationalism (specifically the musical maternal-feminine which logically and chronologically precedes the symbolic, language, and culture) that is so at odds with their broader projects; by contrast, though Badiou never identifies music ‘itself’ with the feminine, the way in which he constructs ‘truth’ nonetheless rehabilitates a certain feminine exceptionalism alongside a pervasive misogyny in his work. The concluding analytic argues for multiply intersecting planes of mediation and a non-reductive approach to both music and gender that refuses to attribute a single essence to either.

scholarly journals Gendering Property, Racing Capital

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Hall
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Wealth Creation ◽  
Gender And Race ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
And Gender ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter takes one of the central subjects of economic and social history—the development of capitalism—and reinterprets classical debates through the lens of ‘race’ and gender. Drawing on impressive new research on British slave ownership in the Caribbean (the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project at UCL), it argues that gender and ‘race’ not only structured the organization of property and power in slave society but were also historically dynamic axes of change. Each played a part in both cementing and dissolving the system of slavery with its particular forms of wealth creation. This significantly recalibrates traditional accounts of the relationship between slavery, capitalism, and emancipation and places culture at the heart of historical change.

scholarly journals To be Forever Young? Towards Reframing Corporeal Subjectivity in Maturity

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Schwaiger
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Cultural Perceptions ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Ageing Body ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

In this paper I examine the relationship between the body in midlife and subjectivity in contemporary western cultures, drawing on both social constructionist and psychoanalytic perspectives. Referring to recent theoretical accounts, I take the position that how we are aged by culture begins in midlife, and that this period is therefore critical in understanding how the body-subject in western consumer cultures is aged and gendered through culturally normative discourses and practices. I also address the gendering of ageing bodies, and argue that, like the feminine, ageing has been marked by ambiguity and lack. This ambiguity has presented a problem for dualistic age theories, in that it has been difficult to theorize the ageing body productively since the binary language used to theorize it already devalues old age. I contend that our tacit understanding of both male and female ageing bodies is as discursively constituted as ’feminine’, based on cultural perceptions of loss of bodily control and the ambiguity of ageing bodies that become increasingly recalcitrant in the ’correct’ performance of cultural age and gender norms. Finally, I inquire whether alternative, non-dualistic perspectives might be developed that redress this problem, and disrupt the alignment of ageing with negative associations such as lack and loss, perspectives that, rather than associating gendered ageing with decline, loss or lack, associate it with the goal of living an abundant life into deep old age.

Cultivating Sympathy: Sophie Condorcet's Letters on Sympathy

2001 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evelyn L. Forget
Keyword(s):  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Intellectual Community ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Wolfgang Iser ◽  
Intellectual Environment ◽  
Theory Of Moral Sentiments

In 1798, Sophie de Grouchy, the marquise de Condorcet, published a translation of the seventh edition of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1792), along with a series of eight “letters” on the subject of sympathy. These letters are, in fact, substantial essays that allow us to discern how she read Smith. Intellectual historians have a tendency to privilege an author's intent, and to read the Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to determine what Smith actually meant, and how meaning was constructed in the context of a particular intellectual environment. As long ago as 1978, literary theorists such as Wolfgang Iser suggested that a reader's response is at least as interesting a question as an author's intent (Iser 1978). And Sophie de Grouchy is no ordinary reader. Her translation of, and commentary on, Smith's work allow us to see how a theory constructed in the intellectual context of the Scottish Enlightenment would be received by a different intellectual community. While de Grouchy shared much of the background that informed Smith's work, she could not write a commentary on sympathy during the Terror without taking into account recent French political experience and debate. And, I argue, her reading was not merely idiosyncratic, but rather representative of a particular group of intellectuals seized with the problem of adapting Enlightenment theory to the political reality of the Republic.

II—Ambition, Love, And Happiness

2020 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-45
Author(s):  
Glen Pettigrove
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theory Of Moral Sentiments

Abstract What is the relationship between ambition and love? While discussions of happiness often mention romances, friendships, aspirations, and achievements, the relationship between these features is seldom discussed. This paper aims to fill that gap. It begins with a suggestive remark made by La Rochefoucauld and repeated by Adam Smith: ‘Love often leads on to ambition, but seldom does one return from ambition to love.’ To explain what accounts for such a pattern, I introduce a distinction between stage-setting emotions and master emotions, which is useful for illuminating relationships between a number of emotions, including ambition and love. Drawing on things Smith says elsewhere in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, I conclude by highlighting one way the pattern might be reversed and ambition might lead to love.

Sophie de Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Short Text ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Fruitful Cooperation ◽  
Early Relationships ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theory Of Moral Sentiments

Sophie de Grouchy (1764–1822), published her Lettres sur la Sympathie in 1798, together with her translation of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This short text is presented as her critical commentary on Smith, but also offers original analyses of the relationship of emotional and moral development to economic, institutional, and political reform. Like Smith, Grouchy believes that sympathy is fundamental to social well-being. She improves on his theory by offering an account of its origin; and she argues it is the result of early relationships of dependence. The political conclusions Grouchy draws from her analysis are in tune with her republican views: social equality can only be the result of recognizing that we depend on each other. Deepening Smith’s position, Grouchy argues that inequality hinders the growth of sympathy and renders fruitful cooperation between the different strata of society unlikely or impossible. This new translation of the text is presented with an introduction divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 covers Sophie de Grouchy’s life, times, and sources. Chapter 2 discusses Grouchy’s work, with a special emphasis on the relationship of the Letters to Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which the Letters were a response to, as well as a discussion of other writings by Grouchy. Chapter 3 touches on three main philosophical themes present in the Letters: political philosophy, with an emphasis on the republican aspect of Grouchy’s thought; her legal philosophy and political economy; and her aesthetics.

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