Scottish Enlightenment

James Wilson was the most influential advocate for the American Constitution to be based on popular sovereignty. But the few attempts to understand Wilson's conception of popular sovereignty do not explain the crucial connection to Thomas Reid's moral philosophy, the reason for this, or its implications. Wilson was concerned with Pufendorf's moral scepticism, which said that man is unable to discern his duties to his fellow man as imposed by natural law. To ensure a peaceful society, therefore, man must be subservient to government. Wilson, recognising that this could foster tyranny in an American government, sought to supplant Pufendorf's system by turning to Reid's moral philosophy. Reid had argued that all men have a God-given moral faculty which gives them access to objective 'first principles of morals' that impose duties to God, others, and oneself. Wilson argued that man is superior to government because man must be free of any positive law that may interfere with the discharge of such duties. That Reid's philosophy was the foundation of Wilson's view of popular sovereignty is made clear by a detailed comparison of Reid's and Wilson's works, as well as analysis of two previously unexamined manuscripts of Wilson's.

This study examines the influence of Adam Smith's philosophical ideas-particularly the "invisible hand," division of labor, and rational self-interest-on local economic practices. Using a qualitative case study approach based on secondary data, the research explores how Smith's principles manifest in local policies, entrepreneurial behavior, and community welfare. Findings reveal that Smith's ideas continue to shape local economic strategies, though their application is often mediated by socio-cultural values. The study affirms the enduring relevance of Smith's contributions in fostering sustainable and equitable local development.

A busca por alternativas razoáveis ao combate dos excessos causados pelas paixões violentas – responsáveis pelo adoecimento do corpo social – foi tarefa política comum, senão central, a diversos autores do Século das Luzes, em especial a Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3º Conde de Shaftesbury e David Hume. Essa razoabilidade, no entanto, deixou de ser pensada enquanto uma espécie de abstração instrumental e passou a ser tomada, tanto para Shaftesbury quanto para Hume, em termos afetivos. Por esse motivo, toda uma dimensão da vida comum adquiriu, para esses autores, dignidade filosófica, ao mesmo tempo em que o convívio social se revelou como lugar privilegiado ao refinamento dos juízos. Não obstante, embora ambos divirjam quanto às peculiaridades de um método próprio ao necessário equilíbrio dos afetos, não deixam de concordar que este passa pelo cultivo de certo decoro, necessário ao exercício pleno das liberdades. Referido cultivo é promovido, por sua vez, por uma educação que estimula o diálogo ou a comunicabilidade entre as diversas inclinações ou afetos humanos, no lugar de pretender eliminá-los. Nesse cenário, Hume resgata do pensamento shaftesburiano a ideia da formação histórico-social de um senso de civilidade, análogo a um afeto reflexivo, capaz de autorregulação, para pensar o aporte natural das virtudes sociais. Contudo, ao pensar a virtude social que organiza, primordialmente, a sociedade política (a justiça) como uma virtude artificial, Hume nega a passagem espontânea entre os resultados da boa educação dos afetos para a boa formação dos governos, entendendo antes que no espaço dessa passagem há contingências. A convenção, então, faz-se necessária para regrar a insegurança resultante desse cenário, instaurar e comprometer os homens para com o bem comum (relacionado à ideia de coisa pública), a despeito de seus interesses mais imediatos e de suas liberdades pessoais originárias. A simpatia ou o moral sense humiano precisará ser alargado, para que o senso de civilidade possa ser apurado, formado e reconhecido, ao longo da história, como fundamento moral da vida política, como outrora propunha Shaftesbury.

This study will present the relation between belief and knowledge in the course of history of thinking. It attempts, at first, to think about these two phenomena in general, and then later, in Early modern philosophy. Therefore, tentatively, it begins with Tales’ abandonment of mythology and includes Kant’s abandonment of dogmatism. Following this line of reasoning, Kant’s abandonment of dogmatism, which has got its explanation in his capital work Kritik der reinen Vernunft, will be presented beginning with his pre-critical, then metaphysical and finally critical period. Hypothesis, as a presupposed truthful judgment in order to explain certain facts or as a supposition based on facts, manifests in thesis that the relation between belief and knowledge in Immanuel Kant’s epistemology best materializes its explication after a critique of rational theology; namely the one that has proven to have lost every possibility and credibility for materializing tendencies of proclaiming itself a science.

Disciplinarity in the academy causes many problems. In the name of protecting and intensifying what is asserted to be a set of unique skills and methodologies, it reinscribes a professional hierarchy who tend to seek their own reproduction through the process of granting of tenure to their successors, and who police-sometimes rigidly-the boundaries of their own field of enquiry. Foucault's Surveiller et punir is often as true of the academy as of the state: disciplines and punishment go together. Innovation, increasingly necessary and desirable as it is seen to be in our wider society, is difficult to achieve in the Arts and Humanities, because arguably no area of the university is so intensively siloed, despite the importance of creating unified fields of enquiry. It is true that one can never underestimate the power of culture to define the questions and stories that lie at the heart of different societies, but cultural comparativism (and even comparative literature) are difficult areas to make reputations in, because they cut across the perceived methodologies of traditional disciplines. Yet when the United States has 77% recidivism among its huge (and costly) prison population and Norway has 20% among its much smaller per capita number of prisoners, it is clear that American culture's retributive instincts trump the data. 1 Culture defies the evidence that could change policy, and that is why its exploration is an imperative, one which is widely frustrated by the narrow territorialism of disciplinarity, which itself serves to threaten the very future of Arts and

By trying to combine different approaches (cultural history of translations, book history, material bibliography), this paper will focus on the role that translations had in the Italian circulation of William Robertson’s Histories during the second half of the 18th century. I will examine some paradigmatic examples, by paying attention to both textual and paratextual adaptations elaborated by the publishers and translators in order to attract readers’ attention (lexical omissions or additions, manipulations of sentences, insertion of prefaces, cartographic materials, notes, tables of contents).

La figura dello scozzese Colin Morison è rimasta indistinta tra quelle dei tanti britannici che affollarono la brulicante capitale pontificia nel secondo Settecento. Il suo originale profilo culturale emerge in questo libro grazie alla ricostruzione della sua attività editoriale e collezionistica, resa possibile, quest'ultima, grazie al recupero di documenti inediti e all'individuazione del suo marchio di collezione.

Originally composed in 2024 as part of the coursework for the Research and Writing Techniques lesson. The purpose of this paper is to explore how integrity and intuition were used to build Emersonian individualism, and their practical implications and connections to the self as per Emerson's arguments.

This workshop for CONSTANT 18 looked at the history and the development of the textbook, choosing examples mainly from chemistry. It is surprisingly, an extremely interesting area, which was made more human by including some biography of textbook authors and also some of their ideals and beliefs, which were frequently explained in the prefaces of textbooks. Quite a number of early textbook authors were women and their books made a significant contribution to the later history of science. For example Jane Marcet's "Conversations in Chemistry" (1806) was the book that inspired the young Michael Faraday to take up a career in science. The aim of the workshop is not to dispute that modern technology is making inroads on the relevance of the textbook, but rather to place textbooks in their historical context as a part of that change process currently occurring in education.

'Modern Korean Engagements with Scottish Writers: Exploring the Literary and Intellectual History of Korean-Scottish Relations' (with John M. Frankl)

The literary and intellectual relationships between Scotland and Korea have developed considerably in recent years. In 2019, for example, the Scottish Centre for Korean Studies was established at the University of Edinburgh. Many Scots are interested in Korean culture, both academics and the general public. Engagements between Scottish and Korean writers extend back into the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, however, during Korea’s ‘opening’ to Western nations during the ‘Gaehwa’ period. Scottish Enlightenment political economy and conjectural history/stadial theory were of major interest to Koreans in a time of huge transformations in East Asia. Christianity also made a significant impact due to the influence of missionaries, especially on education. Our paper connects these trends by examining the impact of Scottish writers in Korea from the late Chosun era, through the colonial period, and down to the present.

Though David Hume never wrote a systematic treatise on aesthetics, his reflections in the Treatise of Human Nature and his essays outline a coherent theory of taste. This presentation highlights three key themes: pride, sympathy, and refinement. Pride grounds our sense of beauty in ourselves, while sympathy allows us to recognize beauty in others and in art. Refinement, through cultivated taste, links aesthetic judgment to civic virtue and social harmony. By drawing these strands together, Hume shows how aesthetics extends beyond art criticism to shape moral character, social life, and the health of political communities.

The new and first complete edition of the works of Allan Ramsay (1684-1758) in six volumes is beginning to draw renewed attention towards this important poet. This essay examines one of the key unexamined puzzles of his career: how an Edinburgh wigmaker apparently without any advantage of birth and connexions, succeeded in gathering an enormously distinguished subscription list-including nearly sixty peers and eight dukes-for his first key collection of poems. The answer lies both in the powerful and interlocking networks which Ramsay had inherited, cultivated or adopted, and in the particular culture and political moment in post-Union Edinburgh in which he came to maturity. Ramsay's key network groups are discussed under four headings: Jacobites, Friends and Clubs, Local dignitaries, family links, professionals and merchants; patronage and wider artistic networks.

Todos os direitos reservados. Nenhuma parte desta revista poderá ser reproduzida ou transmitida, sejam quais forem os meios empregados, sem permissão por escrito. Os conceitos emitidos em artigos assinados são de responsabilidade exclusiva de seus autores.

1 explicate and compare the accounts of sympathy found in the writings of David Hume, David Hadey, and Adam Smith, particularly with respect to their historical and doctrinal relations with earlier conceptions of sympathy. I argue that Humean "anatomical" sympathy bears some interesting relations to the concept of sympathy current in eighteenth-century Scottish medicine, most notably in the works of Hume's Edinburgh contemporary Robert Whytt. I briefly outline the history of medical sympathy from Hippocrates and Galen through Thomas Willis at Oxford and Hermann Boerhaave at Leiden, whose students dominated early eighteenth-century Edinburgh medicine. Hartley, himself a physician, also made reference to medical sympathy, but was more interested in what 1 cal1 "millenuian" sympathy, a conception of s p p a t h y as the progressive psychological coalescence of al1 human consciousness, the result of which is self-annihilation. The roots of millenarian sympathy, 1 suggest, may be traced to such works as Plotinus' Enneads and Robert Fludd's Philosophia Moysaica. Adam Smith, in contrast, took a "theatrical* view of sympathy that owed much to the sentimentalkt celebration of man's "good nature" that had arisen in response to the perceived cynicism of Hobbes and Mandeville. Having established sorne possible historical bases of the three authors' conceptions of sympathy, I analyze the functîon that sympathy plays in each of their moral theories. In Hume's case, this involves a signifïcant revision of the received view-1 attempt to show that Hume's view of sympathy was not inspired by sentimentalism so much as by the need to fil1 an important epistemological gap in his moral theory. 1 argue that this ernphasis was in keeping with that found in a number of less celebrated witers whom Hume is known to have aàmired: Abbé Dubos,

Vision is an important metaphor in ethical and political questions of knowledge. The feminist philosopher Donna Haraway points out the "perverse" nature of an intrusive, alienating, all-seeing vision (to which we might cry out "stop looking at me!"), but also encourages us to embrace the embodied nature of sight and its promises for genuinely situated knowledge. Current technologies of machine vision -surveillance cameras, drones (for war or recreation), iPhone cameras -are usually construed as instances of the former rather than the latter, and for good reasons. However, although in no way attempting to diminish the real suffering these technologies have brought about in the world, I make the case for understanding technologies of computer vision as material instances of embodied seeing and situated knowing. Furthermore, borrowing from Iris Murdoch's concept of moral vision, I suggest that these technologies direct our labor towards self-reflection in ethically significant ways. My approach draws upon paradigms in computer vision research, phenomenology, and feminist epistemology. Ultimately, this essay is an argument for directing more philosophical attention from merely criticizing technologies of vision as ethically deficient towards embracing them as complex, methodologically and epistemologically important objects.

In anticipation of the US bisesquicentennial-the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independencein 2026, this issue focuses on the formation of the US. Contributors cast fresh light on the political ideas that shaped this world, and, in several instances, draw connections between the issues that shaped the early republic and those that continue to reverberate in contemporary US politics.

This book examines the ideas of Adam Smith for stimulating foundational reimaginations of economics that are intellectually rooted in Islam. As a moral philosopher with a broad range of ideas, Adam Smith is demonstrated here to be the culminating figure of the sentimentalist school of Scottish ethics, the progenitor of a new English rhetoric, a key figure in the conjectural method of stadial history, as well as a keen theorist of modern scientific methods. The first part of the book lays out the coherence of a system that Smith’s oeuvre provides when read together, whereby his famous Wealth of Nations emerge as part of a larger intellectual project of building a ‘science of man’ that incorporates various aspects of human and social life. A chief concern of this project was the development of novel scientific methods which would provide an empirical basis for morality rooted in human nature, and inform politics by delineating the route to personal liberty. The second part of the book is an intensive examination of various foundational aspects like language, ethics, politics and history in Smith’s writings. This penetrating and contextualized reading of Smith become a means for linking sophisticated ideas rooted in Islamic traditions to the discipline of economics. These include rhetorical theories of balaghah, Kalam notions of causality, the notion of ‘riqqa’ (empathy) in Ash’ari ethics, and the political implications of ‘mithaq’ (covenant). Engagements with Islamic traditions are thus primarily to disclose the immense possibilities latent within these traditions and thereby stimulate further research.

An immense amount of labour was spent on this book by the late Professor W. S. Craig, and it is tragic that he did not live to see the finished product. It will, however, serve to commemorate the College's forthcoming tercentenary. Since its establishment by charter, granted by Charles II in 1681, the College has played an important role not only in Edinburgh, but also in relationship with its sister colleges in Glasgow and London, and with its Fellows and Members in all parts of the British Commonwealth. Its influence outside the University has been, and still is, an important factor in its functioning. It has played an active role in social reforms, particularly in Scotland, and in advocating improved public health and sanitation in Edinburgh. Today it is actively involved with postgraduate teaching and research, and its library is one of the best of its kind in Britain, having been founded in 1682. Professor Craig traces its evolution in great detail and deals with every possible aspect of its activity both in Edinburgh and elsewhere, over its three hundred years of existence. The material used is fully supported with references and notes and with several long extracts from documents and there are many excellent illustrations. Several appendices include additional data, one of them(E)having a translation of the College's Charter. The price is not excessive when the size and the quality of production are taken into account. This is a book for reference rather than for continuous reading and the excellent indexes will direct the enquirer to the topic or person he seeks. As a repository of factual information it will remain a definitive work, but unfortunately it does not go beyond this. In other words, little attempt is made to study the local, national and international background influences, which affect the establishment and survival of any institution. As Dr. Christopher Lawrence and other historians are pointing out, the Edinburgh scene particularly in the eighteenth century as it influenced medicine was very complex, and in order to comprehend the College fully we must understand the extra-Collegiate climate and the problems it encountered, as well as the state of medicine elsewhere in the world. This is not, however, to belittle Professor Craig's enormous labours for which we should be most grateful. It would seem, however, that the Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians has not had the services of the kind of historian who recorded the history of its some-time rival institution in London. A. L. DONOVAN, Philosophical chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment. The doctrines and discoveries of William Cullen and Joseph Black, Edinburgh University Press, 1975, 8vo, pp. x, 343, illus., £7.00. Dr. Donovan of the University of West Virginia is concerned here with a study of the interaction of the two great eighteenth-century Scottish chemists, William Cullen (1710-1790), and his pupil Joseph Black (1728-1799) who discovered carbon dioxide in chalk when seeking a lithotropic agent. This important advance and its genesis are discussed here in detail; it is essential to realize that Black accepted the theory of phlogiston at this time, although he abandoned it later. This and Black's influence on the emerging science of heat form the second part of the book, the first being an

This article studies labour-saving technologies among eighteenth-century pupils, students, and academics by looking at the organisation of paper. The mathematician Colin Campbell of Achnaba (1644-1726), a minister of the Church of Scotland, repurposed the letters which were sent to him, turning them into notebooks by cutting up the paper and reusing the blank spaces for mathematical notes. Following the sources of Campbell's 'letters-as-notebooks', I suggest that the study of reuse should not only trace materials in households but also include their wider circulation in networks beyond the home. Campbell's workplace thus illuminates his mediating role as minister in the confessional culture of the early Scottish Enlightenment.

actual, a vice must be possible' (p. ). Harding continues by showing that Augustine's specific criticisms of Roman ethics, e.g., the Roman attitude towards suicide, do not arise simply from Christian distaste for these practices, but from his conviction that there were internal inconsistencies in the Roman position. Harding's work uses well known material from The City of God to make an original and important point. Our understanding of Augustine's aims and methods in that work should be revised accordingly.

Participation au séminaire WIP (Work in Progress) du Laboratoire CRINI, Nantes Université, 2024-2025. Organisation : Léna Kervran.

24/06/2025 :
16h15-16h30 Louis Pichot, "Environmentalism and the Philosophy of Nature in the Scottish Enlightenment".

This paper explores the connections between the philosophy of nature and the emergence of environmentalist thought during the Scottish Enlightenment. After a brief presentation of my doctoral research on the Scottish Enlightenment and the philosophy of norms, I will examine how an environmentalist perspective offers valuable insights into this field of study. In particular, I will discuss the contributions of Frederick Albritton Jonsson's Enlightenment's Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven & London, Yale UP, 2013), which provides a crucial framework for understanding the relationship between Enlightenment thought and early environmental concerns.

Am Beispiel romantischer Übersetzungen Sc(h)ottischer Balladen untersucht der Beitrag, u.a. in Auseinandersetzung mit den Schriften Achim von Arnims, Jacob und Wilhelm Grimms und Henriette Schubarts, die Formen und Funktionen des balladesken Transfers zwischen den Sprachen, Druck- und Sammlungsformaten und fragt nach den damit verknüpften Textmodifikationen, die sich von der Ästhetik der Texte bis hin zu ihrer Bezeichnung erstrecken. Nach kurzen Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Migration und Balladentradition im Allgemeinen, mit Blick auf die Romantik im deutschsprachigen Raum im Speziellen, wird anhand der „romantic ballads“ "The Cruel Sister", "Earl Richard", "The Lass of Lochroyan" und "The Gay Goss Hawk" und ihren Übertragungen gezeigt, wie (a) der textuelle Transfer von mündlicher Tradierung zur schriftlichen Textur, (b) von englischsprachiger Vorlage zur deutschen Übersetzung funktioniert und (c) von diversen Übersetzungs- und Herausgeberinstanzen funktionalisiert wird.

Modern, Liberalism worse than the old The dangers of the old German Liberalism were over-stressed as a foreign threat to the evangelical, Reformed faith in Western English-speaking countries as it remained basically outside of Reformed, evangelical belief. This feature, perhaps, kept the eyes of Anglo-Saxon evangelicals blind to the even greater form of Liberalism which was growing and spreading amongst their own ranks. Nowadays, few evangelicals would accept, say, Bauer's Tübingen Hegelian theories of the origin and structure of the Christian faith and the Three Bs have mostly lost their influence, especially in German universities. However, the English-speaking evangelical Liberalism with its roots in the 17 th century Enlightenment fostered by Samuel Rutherford, Presbyterians, Latitudinarians, Congregationalists and Fullerite-Baptists is with us still and even appears to be winning ground. It is far more dangerous than the old Liberalism as it has replaced the true Christian faith hook, line and sinker in many formerly sound churches. This Liberalism now claims to be the very gospel itself. Liberalism now pervades former evangelical churches through Andrew Fuller's teaching on the temporary nature of revelation and the permanence of natural religion and many Reformed churches have taken over Tillich's views of the Atonement as a mere metaphor or piece of imagery. These theories are basically Arian as they rob Christ of His divine glory. Indeed, they are atheistic as they make God the servant of nature and not nature's Lord. This has been my conviction from the time in my young adult days when I read Andrew Fuller's confession that, for, him, Natural Law was more

A comprehensive study of the European reception of Iranian antiquities between 1660 and 1830, "Le quaranta colonne" combines a coherent diachronic narrative of reception with in-depth textual and visual analyses of descriptions of material remains and micro-analytic reconstructions of the intellectual context of six main historical actors: Jean Chardin, Cornelis de Bruijn, the count of Caylus, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Arnold Heeren, and Sir John Malcolm. The book illustrates what specific answers the Iranian case offer to far reaching questions about early modern receptions of Antiquity. First of all, Iranian antiquities provided a space where contamination between different cultures of the past was made possible, along with the possibility of writing polyphonic histories of Iran: I make the case for a momentary commensurability between European and Persianate visions of the past in the early eighteenth century, as well as for its later rejection. Secondly, textual and visual descriptions of Iranian antiquities and their manipulation had a specific impact on the definition of the historical and geographical boundaries of Antiquity. I innovatively illustrate this dynamic by analysing the geographical shifting of the aesthetic category of "ruin" from the Near East to the "classical" core of the Mediterranean over the eighteenth century. Finally, descriptive/prescriptive intellectual devices shaped by Enlightenment traditions of history-writing (such as "nomadism" and "despotism") played a pivotal role in neutralizing and domesticating the cultural difference materialised by non-European antiquities, and were way more influential in determining their use and interpretation than the concurrent decipherment of ancient non European scripts (such as the cuneiform writing systems).

This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version.

This paper answers two questions: (1) What is the relationship between freedom and the concepts of love and the will? (2) What does this relationship mean for the concept of freedom? By reading and interpreting Hannah Arendt's political thought, this paper argues that, on the one hand, through a self-transformation of the will-or, in Arendt's language, our willing activity-the will can turn into what she called "the spring of action". Our willing activity, Arendt said, must transform itself into activities of love, which serves as "a coupling, binding agent", to achieve self-sufficiency and to aid in building relationships. On the other hand, this paper contends that without this transformation-without the will transforming itself into a loving will-we cannot even begin to take action. The loving will constitutes the impetus that propels us to step outside of our solipsistic circumstances and, as "a binding agent", to get in touch with persons and things outside of ourselves. It is this impetus, or what I call the courage of movement, that Arendt viewed not only as

An immense amount of labour was spent on this book by the late Professor W. S. Craig, and it is tragic that he did not live to see the finished product. It will, however, serve to commemorate the College's forthcoming tercentenary. Since its establishment by charter, granted by Charles II in 1681, the College has played an important role not only in Edinburgh, but also in relationship with its sister colleges in Glasgow and London, and with its Fellows and Members in all parts of the British Commonwealth. Its influence outside the University has been, and still is, an important factor in its functioning. It has played an active role in social reforms, particularly in Scotland, and in advocating improved public health and sanitation in Edinburgh. Today it is actively involved with postgraduate teaching and research, and its library is one of the best of its kind in Britain, having been founded in 1682. Professor Craig traces its evolution in great detail and deals with every possible aspect of its activity both in Edinburgh and elsewhere, over its three hundred years of existence. The material used is fully supported with references and notes and with several long extracts from documents and there are many excellent illustrations. Several appendices include additional data, one of them(E)having a translation of the College's Charter. The price is not excessive when the size and the quality of production are taken into account. This is a book for reference rather than for continuous reading and the excellent indexes will direct the enquirer to the topic or person he seeks. As a repository of factual information it will remain a definitive work, but unfortunately it does not go beyond this. In other words, little attempt is made to study the local, national and international background influences, which affect the establishment and survival of any institution. As Dr. Christopher Lawrence and other historians are pointing out, the Edinburgh scene particularly in the eighteenth century as it influenced medicine was very complex, and in order to comprehend the College fully we must understand the extra-Collegiate climate and the problems it encountered, as well as the state of medicine elsewhere in the world. This is not, however, to belittle Professor Craig's enormous labours for which we should be most grateful. It would seem, however, that the Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians has not had the services of the kind of historian who recorded the history of its some-time rival institution in London. A. L. DONOVAN, Philosophical chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment. The doctrines and discoveries of William Cullen and Joseph Black, Edinburgh University Press, 1975, 8vo, pp. x, 343, illus., £7.00. Dr. Donovan of the University of West Virginia is concerned here with a study of the interaction of the two great eighteenth-century Scottish chemists, William Cullen (1710-1790), and his pupil Joseph Black (1728-1799) who discovered carbon dioxide in chalk when seeking a lithotropic agent. This important advance and its genesis are discussed here in detail; it is essential to realize that Black accepted the theory of phlogiston at this time, although he abandoned it later. This and Black's influence on the emerging science of heat form the second part of the book, the first being an

¿Considera Hume que la filosofía es una actividad exclusivamente masculina? La posibilidad de que las mujeres desarrollen actividades filosóficas no se vislumbra claramente en las obras de Hume. Por un lado, en su teoría de la naturaleza humana no encontramos sesgos de género innatos ni hay en su teoría del conocimiento aptitudes cognitivas privativas de los varones que los habiliten como los únicos filósofos legítimos. Pero, por otro, al atender a factores culturales, políticos y económicos —lo que Hume llama “causas morales”— encontramos que hay diversos impedimentos para la participación plena de las mujeres en el ámbito de la erudición. Mi propósito es mostrar que para Hume esas causas pueden modificarse. El surgimiento de una sociedad comercial es un indicativo de ese cambio. En ese nuevo escenario se ofrecen mayores oportunidades a las mujeres tanto para participar en la esfera pública como para desplegar su capacidad cognitiva en actividades intelectuales.//
Does Hume regard philosophy as an activity restricted to men only? The possibility of women being philosophers does not appear clearly in Hume’s texts. On the one hand, there are no innate gender biases in his theory of human nature nor cognitive abilities in his theory of knowledge, which signal men as the only legitimate philosophers. On the other hand, when we look at cultural, political, and economic factors – what Hume calls “moral causes”– we find that there are numerous impediments to the full participation of women in the learned world. However, I aim to show that Hume believes these causes can be modified. The rise of a new commercial society offers greater opportunities for women both to participate in the public sphere and to deploy their cognitive capacity in intellectual activities.

From the arrival of the printed book in Scotland in the late fifteenth century, the advent of the press in 1508 and to the great flowering of print culture in the Scottish Enlightenment, the progress in Scottish intellectual culture depended on a diverse band of book merchants and book makers. This group, varied in wealth, capacity for inventiveness, political and religious beliefs and links with the establishment, nevertheless had much in common. Not least of these common bonds was the requirement to ply their trade in the same 'national crisis' of Scotland's early modern period. From Flodden in 1513 to Culloden in 1745 warfare, religious revolution, civil war and economic collapse battered Scottish society. These political and religious upheavals presented a rigorous challenge for the Scottish printer and book trader before the outstanding successes of the Scottish Enlightenment. After all, print merely precipitated and reflected the qualities of national history. But even before the Enlightenment we should marvel at the success and resilience of Scottish print culture and its mediators. Printing itself arrived in Scotland in 1507-8, a few decades after England but before Russia and some of Scandinavia. Walter Chepman (c.1473-c.1528) and Andrew Myllar (fl.1503-8) began printing in Edinburgh in 1508 under a license provided by James IV. Nothing survives of their press after 1510 and though there are a few significant productions from a scattering of other presses, notable by Thomas Davidson (fl. 1532-42) (see figure 1 below), printing was not firmly established in Edinburgh until after 1560. As print slowly expanded in the capital, before some faster growth in the early seventeenth century, presses were established in Aberdeen (1622) and Glasgow (1638). 2 Slow economic growth and slow local patronage explain this tardiness outside Edinburgh, there being no government or trade restrictions on press proliferation. In its first century the small Aberdeen press proved remarkably innovative in music publishing and almanac printing, but the eighteenth century also saw the coming of age for the Glasgow press which looked to supply the demand of the Americas and Ireland. Glasgow also supplied brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Stirling Online Research Repository (RIOXX)

The objective of this Critical Guide is to provide a series of in-depth studies on the Essays of David Hume, as well as an account of the state of scholarship. In Hume’s lifetime, the Essays acquired considerable éclat throughout Europe and North America; they influenced the writings of such diverse figures as James Madison and William Paley, and they have since become a staple of undergraduate and graduate curricula in history, politics, and philosophy. Yet the Essays have received comparatively modest attention in the scholarship of Hume’s life and thought. The early tradition of Hume’s intellectual biography, pioneered by J. Y. T. Greig and Ernest Campbell Mossner, subordinated the Essays to Hume’s Treatise and Enquiries as monuments of Hume’s contribution to the history of philosophy. This tendency diminished in the 1970s and 1980s, when Duncan Forbes, J. G. A. Pocock and Istvan Hont placed the Essays at the heart of their studies of Hume’s political thought and political economy. The significance of the Essays in James Harris’s Hume: An Intellectual Biography (2015) bears witness to the importance that the work has since acquired in general reconstructions of Hume’s intellectual commitments. However, there is no ‘critical guide’ to Hume’s Essays in any language, with recent studies having focused more restrictively on Hume’s political economy. This book is intended to address this absence by providing scholars and students with a wide-ranging and accessible overview of the Essays.

Few, if any, political thinkers of the eighteenth century dealt as thoroughly and extensively with the concept of political party as David Hume. This chapter considers Hume’s various essays that treated the phenomenon of party between 1741 and 1758. In his first essays on party, he showed how both the Whig-Tory and Court-Country alignments were integral to British party politics, with the former dividing the political nation along dynastic and religious lines and the latter being a natural expression of the workings of the mixed constitution and inter-parliamentary conflict. In this way, he sought to transcend the arguments of the Court Whig ministry and the Country party opposition alike. Writing a new set of essays in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745, Hume turned to the parties’ ideological systems, as he tried to show that neither the Whig system of the ‘original contract’ nor the Tory system of passive obedience held water if philosophically probed, but that they could both have salutary consequences. While critical, Hume continued to give a fair hearing to both parties in his final essay on the subject, ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’ (1758). Though he ultimately wrote in favour of the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, this chapter concludes that Hume may have approximated the ideal of non-partisanship as far as was possible in a divided society. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/humes-essays/one-of-the-most-difficult-problems-that-can-be-met-with/D1438862D35480C1C8489B30F437A74A

Vallás és filozófia a 17. századi Franciaországban * A 17. században létezik vallás és létezik filozófia, de nem létezik az a diszciplina, amelyet ma vallásfilozófiának nevezünk. Mert jóllehet a metafizika meghatározó súllyal van jelen a kor gondolkodásban, ami a transzcendenciához fűződő viszonyban specifikusan vallási, az ebben az időszakban nem kitüntetett tárgya a filozófiai eszmélődésnek. 1 Amire az alábbiakban mégis kísérletet teszek, az a filozófia és a vallás kora újkori kapcsolatrendszerének feltérképezése egy általam fontosnak tartott szempont segítségével. E szempontot a 17. század egyik jelentős hitszónoka, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet nemes egyszerűséggel a következő szavakban öntötte formába: "A keresztények Istene nagy." 2 E kijelentés Bossuet korában már hosszú múltra tekinthetett vissza, ám az az interpretáció, amelyet e tradicionális kijelentéshez fűztek a kora újkorban, jelentős változásokról tanúskodik. Tanulmányomban tehát a "nagyság" modern fogalmának filozófiai és vallási implikációit igyekszem kibontani. * A tanulmány megírását a BO/00459/09/2 számú Bolyai János Kutatási Ösztöndíj, valamint a 81165-ös témaszámú OTKA-támogatás tette lehetővé. 1 Kivételt képez e megállapítás alól a vallás mint társadalmi-politikai jelenség, amely Hobbestól Spinozán át Locke-ig elmélyült reflexió tárgya.