Carmichael, Gershom (1672–1729)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Moore ◽  
Michael Silverthorne
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
The University

Gershom Carmichael was a teacher and writer of pivotal importance for the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, predecessor of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Carmichael introduced the natural law tradition of Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke to the moral philosophy courses he taught at the University of Glasgow (1694–1729). His commentaries on Samuel Pufendorf’s work on the duty of man and citizen (1718 and 1724) made his teaching available to a wider readership in Great Britain and in Europe. He also composed an introduction to logic, Breviuscula Introductio ad Logicam, (1720 and 1722) and a brief system of natural theology, Synopsis Theologiae Naturalis (1729).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Blackstone's Science of Legislation

1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The North ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Law And Legislation ◽  
The University

In 1795, Dugald Stewart, the professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and reigning Athenian of the North, observed in a famous estimate of the career of Adam Smith that “the most celebrated works produced in the different countries of Europe during the last thirty years” had “aimed at the improvement of society” by “enlightening the policy of actual legislators.” Among such celebrated productions Stewart included the publications of François Quesnay, Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, Pedro Campomanes, and Cesare Beccaria and, above all, the writings of Smith himself, whose Wealth of Nations “unquestionably” represented “the most comprehensive and perfect work that has yet appeared on the general principles of any branch of legislation.” One of the more striking achievements of recent scholarship on eighteenth-century social thought has been to make sense of this description of Smith's Inquiry and to enable us better to appreciate why Smith chose to describe his system of political economy as a contribution to the “science of a legislator.” In a cultural setting in which, as J. G. A. Pocock has put it, “jurisprudence” was “the social science of the eighteenth century,” law and legislation further featured, in J. H. Burns's formula, as “the great applied science among the sciences of man.” Moralists and jurists of the period, echoing earlier political conventions, may readily have acknowledged with Rousseau that “it would take gods to give men laws.” Nevertheless, even in Rousseau's program for perfecting “the conditions of civil association”—“men being taken as they are and laws as they might be”—a mortal “legislator” appeared plainly “necessary.”

The Influence of Smith’s Jurisprudence on Legal Education in Scotland

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Middle Years ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University

This chapter examines the influence of Adam Smith's jurisprudence on legal education in Scotland. By the middle years of the eighteenth century, natural law thinking had come to dominate the moral philosophy curriculum in the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow. Of primary importance in this development was Gershom Carmichael's adoption of Samuel von Pufendorf's treatise De officio hominis et civis in Glasgow in the 1690s. Following Pufendorf, Carmichael redefined moral philosophy as natural law. The chapter argues that Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence showed how law could be taught as a dynamic historical process and that he revitalised the teaching of natural law as a potential discipline for lawyers. It explains how Smith turned natural law from an abstract ahistorical discipline into a concrete, historical explanation and critique of law.

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.

Archibald MacLaren's “The Negro Slaves” and the Scottish Response to British Colonialism

1994 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Gale
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
British Government ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Cultivation Technology ◽  
Seeds And Fruits

As the end of the eighteenth century approached, Britain experienced many changes in power and prestige: the American colonies had broken away; the philosophy of expansionism and imperial domination was being attacked from within and without, and the primacy of the British fleet and trade organizations was fast becoming a thing of the past. All of these factors, and others, forced a mood of re-evaluation upon the British government and people. Throughout the empire and its colonies the discussion of the merits and morality of the slave trade, for example, reached previously unheard of proportions, as the newly-rediscovered sciences of free-trade economics, moral philosophy, and cultivation technology turned towards the examination of slavery. Nowhere was this more active and adamant than in the Scottish university cities, which had become the centers of intellectual and scientific thought and practice. Thus it is no surprise to find this thematic focus upon the newly strengthened and emboldened Scottish stage. One manifestation was Archibald MacLaren's The Negro Slaves, a play in which can be found the seeds and fruits of the Scottish Enlightenment as it relates to the British abolitionist movement, the economic shift in overseas trade, and the overall milieu of colonial perception.

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