The Cambridge Companion To The Scottish Enlightenment

Provides a comprehensive introduction to the full range of achievements of the Scottish thinkers who so profoundly influenced western culture.

The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment offers a philosophical perspective on an eighteenth-century movement that has been profoundly influential on western culture. A distinguished team of contributors examines the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, Colin Maclaurin and other Scottish thinkers, in fields including philosophy, natural theology, economics, anthropology, natural science and law. In addition, the contributors relate the Scottish Enlightenment to its historical context and assess its impact and legacy in Europe, America and beyond. The result is a comprehensive and accessible volume that illuminates the richness, the intellectual variety and the underlying unity of this important movement. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy, theology, literature and the history of ideas.

The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the truly great intellectual and cultural movements of the world. Its achievements in science, philosophy, history, economics, and other disciplines also, were immense; and its influence has hardly if at all been dimmed in the intervening two centuries. This book, written for the general reader, considers the achievement of this most astonishing period of Scottish history. It attends not only to the ideas that made the Scottish Enlightenment such a wondrous moment, but also to the people themselves who generated these ideas – men such as David Hume and Adam Smith, who are still read for the sake of the light they shed on contemporary issues.

A unique introduction, guide and reference work for students and readers of Scottish literature from the pre-medieval period.

Adam Smith is best known as the founder of scientific economics and as an early proponent of the modern market economy. Political economy, however, was only one part of Smith's comprehensive intellectual system. Consisting of a theory of mind and its functions in language, arts, science, and social intercourse, Smith's system was a towering contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment. His ideas on social intercourse also served as the basis for a moral theory that provided both historical and theoretical accounts of law, politics, and economics. This Companion volume provides an examination of all aspects of Smith's thought. Collectively, the essays take into account Smith's multiple contexts - Scottish, British, European, Atlantic; biographical, institutional, political, philosophical - and they draw on all of his works, including student notes from his lectures. Pluralistic in approach, the volume provides a contextualist history of Smith, as well as direct philosophical engagement with his ideas.

The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the greatest intellectual and cultural movements that the world has ever seen. Its legacy in philosophy, history, science, music, art, architecture, economics, and many other disciplines cannot be overstated. The New Town of Edinburgh would be inconceivable without the doctrines of Enlightenment, equally so would the writings of Karl Marx or the US Constitution. To this day, the doctrines of Enlightenment are still quoted and misquoted. There can be few countries that have produced such a galaxy of talent in so small a compass. David Hume and Adam Smith merely stand as two of the best known.Yet this is the first book for the general reader to consider in its totality the achievement of this most astonishing period of Scottish history, not simply the thoughts, ideas, and people who lived then, but also the creations that were animated by that thought. This is a book not simply about ideas but also about those ideas made flesh and about the new traditions thus created that still animate and inspire the world and the Scotland of today.

"Scotland's rich literary tradition is a product of its unique culture and landscape, as well as of its long history of inclusion and resistance to the United Kingdom. Scottish literature includes masterpieces in three languages - English, Scots and Gaelic - and global perspectives from the diaspora of Scots all over the world. This Companion offers a unique introduction, guide and reference work for students and readers of Scottish literature from the pre-medieval period to the post-devolution present. Essays focus on key periods and movements (the Scottish Enlightenment, Scottish Romanticism, the Scottish Renaissance), genres (the historical novel, Scottish Gothic, 'Tartan Noir') and major authors (Burns, Scott, Stevenson, MacDiarmid and Spark). A chronology and guides to further reading in each chapter make this an ideal overview of a national literature that continues to develop its own distinctive style"--

David Hume is, arguably, the most important philosopher ever to have written in English. Although best known for his contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion, Hume also made substantial and influential contributions to psychology and the philosophy of mind, ethics, the philosophy of science, political and economic theory, political and social history, and, to a lesser extent, aesthetic and literary theory. All facets of Hume's output are discussed in this volume, the first genuinely comprehensive overview of his work. The picture that emerges is of a thinker who, though critical to the point of scepticism, was nonetheless able to build on that scepticism a profoundly important, and still viable, constructive philosophy.