Scottish Enlightenment

Long before we understood the risks of transplanting plant and animal species from one country to another, early botanists like James Smith pioneered and solidified our scientific understanding of the natural world by doing precisely that. The Ayrshire born Smith was "distinguished by peculiar enthusiasm" and "uncommon affection" for plant-life, and was described by his peers as a "sincere and devoted admirer of the vegetable world".

Die Aufklärung läßt sich in vieler Hinsicht dadurch näher bestimmen, daß ihr Verhältnis zur Religion genauer untersucht wird. Wenn es früher oft so war, daß man Aufklärung in engem Zusammenhang zu einer mehr oder weniger radikalen Religionskritik verstand, so gibt es gerade in neuerer Zeit auch Studien, die sogar die Vereinbarkeit von Aufklärung und Katholizismus zum Gegenstand haben, welche lange in einem negativen Sinne vorentschieden war. In der hier vorliegenden theologischen Untersuchung wird nun das Au-genmerk auf die calvinistischen Wurzeln schottischer Aufklärer gelenkt. Da-bei kommt nicht nur Francis Hutcheson ins Spiel, der noch an die Möglich-keit einer Physikotheologie glaubte und Gott und seine Vorsehung unmittel-bar aus der angeblich vernünftigen Gestaltung der Welt ablesen zu können meinte. Vielmehr ist der interessantere Punkt sicher der, daß auch die in bezug auf das traditionelle Christentum deutlich religionskritisch eingestell-ten Autoren David Hume und Adam Smith vor diesem Hintergrund analy-siert werden. 1 In einer Einleitung, die sich insbesondere auf den liberalen Presbyterianer John Simson konzentriert, der wegen seiner theologischen Auffassungen in Schwierigkeiten geraten war und zu den akademischen Lehrern Hutche-sons gehörte, wird der Grund für die detaillierten Studien des Hauptteils ge-legt. 2 In einem ersten Abschnitt des zweiten Teils wendet sich der Verfasser Francis Hutcheson zu, dessen praktische Philosophie vor dem Hintergrund seiner Theologie (Gotteslehre) und seiner Theologischen Anthropologie ent-faltet wird. Hier arbeitet er anhand der theologischen Ausführungen Hutche-1 Zu Hume und Smith siehe zuletzt auch Die Verinnerlichung der sozialen Natur : zum Verhältnis von Freiheit und Einfühlung in der Sozialpsychologie des frühen Liberalismus bei Locke, Shaftesbury, Hume und Smith / Dirk Schuck.-Hamburg : Meiner, 2019.-VII, 218 S. ; 24 cm.-(Studien zum achtzehnten Jahrhundert ; 40).-Zugl.: Leipzig, Univ., Diss., 2016.-ISBN 978-3-7873-3630-2 : EUR 68.00 [#6617].-Eine Rezension in IFB ist vorgesehen.

Scotland’s Enlightenment and Britain’s Empire were inseparably entwined, such that the former’s conceptualisation of humanity bore the indelible impression of the latter. We argue here that by tracing the career and writings of one among a much wider range of travelers educated in Edinburgh in the last years of the eighteenth century, the connections between Scotland’s Enlightenment and colonisation can be usefully explored. Alexander Berry (1781-1873) was educated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh between 1798 and 1800 and then travelled to China, Australia, Fiji and Aotearoa/New Zealand, before eventually becoming a prosperous landowner at Shoalhaven on the South Coast of New South Wales. Throughout it all, Berry speculated on the humanity of diverse peoples he interacted with as physician, merchant, land owner and as a natural historian. His career exemplifies the entangled commercial, colonial, and scientific interests that characterised the global circulation of Enlightenment knowledge in the context of Britain’s expanding Empire. From the intimacy of his encounters with non-European and Indigenous peoples, and the trans-imperial networks of trade and expertise in which he was engaged, his speculations on humanity bore the marks of both Enlightenment and Empire.

This book stresses the importance of returning to David Hume’s political thought, focusing on his ideas about the origin of government and political obedience, and his vision of the ideals of liberty, property, political stability, and moderation, all of which represent a precious source of inspiration for the development of political conservatism. Spartaco Pupo outlines the principle, counter-revolutionary features that characterise Hume’s conservatism: political realism; mistrust of sudden and violent innovations; scepticism toward abstractions; opposition to rationalist arrogance; respect for custom and institutional continuity; the need for the preservation of stability; rejection of ideological rhetoric, sectarianism, and dogmatism; and the defence of the national interest. In so doing, Pupo argues that Hume’s ‘sceptical’ and ‘secular’ version of conservatism – the first to appear on the political scene of modernity – differs significantly from the Anglo-American conservatism that was to arise a few decades after his death, in the wake of Edmund Burke’s writings.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, many critics of the prevailing economic
system and economic science were optimistic that this crisis of Capitalism
would lead to considerable changes. Several years later, however, one must admit
that little has been changed. Critique did not reach its aim. Why did crisis-focussed
critique remain ineffective, although the financial crisis of 2008 was one of the most
dramatic in economic history? The following article proposes an answer to this question
and promotes a new mode of economic critique. Two theses will be developed:
(1) Crisis-focussed critique, as it was established by Karl Marx, has lost its political
effectiveness by the theory of business cycles (section 1 and 2) and (2) Adam Smith
might help us to establish a new way of describing and criticizing economic crises
(section 3 and 4).

Hidden behind the dramatic Ochils to the north-east of Stirling, Menstrie Glen is now largely the preserve of sheep and the occasional hillwalker. The apparent tranquillity belies a rich history and a thriving population that occupied these hills and worked the land prior to the agricultural improvements of the 1700s. The architect of change, James Wright, lived in the heart of the glen and his documentary records illuminate the land use changes that transformed this glen. These historical documents are integrated with the results of archaeological survey work, providing a rich record of a landscape at a key point in the development of Scotland’s landscapes.

This article restores an important figure to the study of eighteenth-century British political and economic thought. A prominent Scottish financial administrator and author resident in Hanoverian London, Adam Anderson (1692-1765) evaluated the expansion of the British commercial empire in the eighteenth century. Anderson developed a sophisticated set of historical arguments about early modern British governance and its relationship to economic growth and societal development. Anderson focused on the evolution of Britain's international commerce, imperial networks and modes of governance. He connected the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union, the development of overseas trade and empire-building. Despite the fact that Anderson set out a nuanced and compelling analysis of Britain's financial revolution that eventually stabilized powerful structures of public and private credit, he has not received significant historiographical attention. This article elucidates his status as a leading historian of the early modern global expansion of European commerce and one of the most widely read and influential commentators on the eighteenth-century British empire.

Metropolitan British governance in the long eighteenth century, and thus the security of Britain's evolving empire, has been viewed increasingly by modern historians as having rested on a complex matrix of administrative and fiscal institutions that developed most notably during the Glorious Revolution and its aftermath and evolved subsequently over the long period of strategic rivalry and military conflict with Britain's rivals in Europe and around the globe. Historians have labelled this model of government-an increasingly centralized and efficient one, at least in comparative terms with Britain's major rival, France-the 'fiscal-military state'. The so-called 'sinews of power' of the British fiscal-military state were at the heart of ideological conflict in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in all parts of the British Atlantic World and beyond. Both defenders and critics of the British governmental system in this era of revolutions in the Atlantic world stressed the crucial importance of the fiscal-military state in deciding the fate of both Britain and its rivals. Competing historical interpretations of the growth, impact and durability of the fiscal-military state, shaped by the context of the challenges of the American and French Revolutions, were central to this key political battle. What was ultimately at stake in this argument? Quite simply, the very future of the political, social and economic structures that constituted British governance, and thus, in turn, the future shape of the broader international order.

Hume refers to women as imaginative, compassionate, conversable, and delicate. While his appraisals of women seem disparate, I argue that they reflect a position about the distinctive role that Hume takes women to have in shaping and enforcing moral norms. On his view, I maintain, women provide us with the ideal model of a moral judge. I claim that Hume sees a tight connection between moral competency and those traits he identifies as feminine. Making this case requires getting clear on a number of concepts in Hume's philosophical toolbox-sympathy, compassion, imagination, etc.-and their relation to one another. The primary quality of a good moral judge, according to Hume, is a delicacy of taste. I show that Hume thinks of delicacy as a feminine skill that can only be developed in men imperfectly, thereby making women the ideal moral judges.

This article examines the “progress” of Scottish metaphysics during the long eighteenth century. The scientific cultivation of natural knowledge drawn from the examples of Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), John Locke (1632–1704), and Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was a defining pursuit in the Scottish Enlightenment. The Aberdonian philosopher George Dalgarno (1616–1687); Thomas Reid (1710–1796), a member of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society known as the Wise Club; and the professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), contributed to that Scottish pattern of philosophical thinking. The question of the extent to which particular external senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) might be improved when others were damaged or absent from birth attracted their particular interest. This article shows the different ways in which Scottish anatomists of the mind resolved Molyneux’s Problem of whether or not an agent could accurately perceive an object from a newly restored external sense.