Acceptance or rejection of factual assertions is a far more important process than logical validation of arguments. Not only are assertions more persuasive than arguments; this is desirable, since we want our beliefs and actions to be reasonable and not just rational. When do we resort to argument? Real speeches heavy on arguments aim to present the speaker as calm, serious, and knowledgeable. In public life, one argues not in order to demonstrate the claim for which one is arguing, but (...) to show that one shares the common prejudices or values that appear in the presuppositions and conclusions of one’s argument, and to demonstrate mastery of the subject matter by displaying relevant knowledge in coherently organized detail. Arguing is thus a way of presenting facts and principles so as to show one’s character as worthy of trust. (shrink)

In his late unfinished work on aesthetic theory, Adam Smith develops the concept of rythmus to explore such arts as music, dance and poetry. Smith argues that rythmus communicates emotion in a very specific way. For Smith, narrative arts, such as drama or the novel, predominately seek to recreate or represent in the minds of their readership or audience the emotions of the characters that are portrayed. But what we experience through rythmus, by contrast, is an original, and not a (...) sympathetic, feeling. Rythmus is the communicative medium of a paradoxical mode of collective feeling in which each person feels his or her own emotions, and yet all feel the same thing; in which social being is at once non-fungible and shared. (shrink)

This paper aims to do two things. First, it describes the place that Adam Smith actually occupies in current research occurring at the boundaries of new interdisciplinary social-science fields such as evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology, neuro-economics and behavioral economics. Second, it suggests a way in which Smith's place in the debates with which these subjects are concerned may be more properly defined and conceptualized. Specifically, the paper focuses on the controversial new theory of strong reciprocity, and on the reputation effects (...) that its critics think that theory neglects. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that the writers of eighteenth century Scotland played a key role in shaping the early practice of social science. This paper examines how this ‘Scottish’ contribution to the Enlightenment generation of social science was shaped by the fascination with unintended consequences. From Adam Smith's invisible hand to Hume's analysis of convention, through Ferguson's sociology, and Millar's discussion of rank, by way of Robertson's View of Progress, the concept of unintended consequences pervades the writing of the period. (...) The paper argues that the idea of unintended order shapes the understanding of the purpose of theoretical social science that emerges from the Scottish Enlightenment. (shrink)

The dissertation traces the development of what I call “the problem of partiality” through the work of certain key figures in the British Moralist tradition: John Locke, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Anthony Ashley Cooper (the Third Earl of Shaftesbury), Francis Hutcheson, John Gay, David Hume, Joseph Butler, and Adam Smith. On the one hand, we are committed to impartiality as a constitutive norm of moral judgment and conduct. On the other hand, we are committed to the idea that it is permissible, (...) or even obligatory, to expend disproportionate resources promoting the good of our loved ones over the good of strangers. However, these two commitments conflict with one another. This problem challenges us to provide an account of the scope and limits of reasonable partiality that does justice to both commitments. I argue that confronting this tension is a central project of early modern ethics. I offer a rereading of the British Moralist tradition, centered on debates about partiality, and thereby shift discussion of the tradition away from concerns about meta-ethics and moral epistemology, to issues of practical ethics. The topic of partiality remains central in contemporary ethics, as is evident in ongoing debates about the place of empathy in moral judgment, and the role of love in shaping our moral commitments. Though the aim of the dissertation is not to settle questions about the scope and limits of reasonable partiality, the focus here remains fixed on how the concept of partiality was problematized in our ethical thought, and how it informs our discussions in normative ethics and moral psychology. Alongside building a bridge between early modern scholarship and recent work in ethics, the dissertation casts light on two understudied figures in the British Moralist tradition – Cockburn and Gay – who contributed greatly to debates about partiality. By examining their contributions, I reconsider their place in the history of modern ethics and therefore provide a more contextualized account of philosophical thought in the period. (shrink)

The paper discusses Ricardo's relationship to Mill and Bentham. It discusses first the origins of the myth of Ricardo's dependence from Bentham through Mill, and Halévy's contribution to the freezing of such a myth. The paper reconstructs what were their shared political commitments and activities and the kind of specific political views and agenda that may be ascribed to Ricardo himself. The paper discusses then the question of Ricardo's adhesion to Benthamite ethics. It examines fragments in Ricardo's correspondence with Maria (...) Edgeworth and Francis Place, and adds fresh light on the issue by highlighting the partial overlapping between Bentham's ethics and the kind of intuitionism with theological consequentialism that Ricardo had learned from the Unitarian minister Thomas Belsham. (shrink)

In this paper I reconstruct the birth, blossoming and decline of an eighteenth century program, namely “Moral Newtonianism”. I reconstruct the interaction, or co-existence, of different levels: positive theories, methodology, worldviews and trace the presence of scattered items of the various levels in the work of Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart. I highlight how Mirowski’s reconstruction of the interaction between physics and economics may be extended to the eighteenth century in an interesting way once the outdated reconstruction of (...) Adam Smith that has been adopted by Mirowski is updated. I show how general methodological ideas, such as the distinction between ultimate causes or essences and intermediate principles, that originated in a context where the issue was the interaction between natural science and theology, proved useful when transferred to social theory in encouraging a kind of “experimental” approach to social phenomena. I discuss finally the genesis of frozen metaphors such as equilibrium, circulation, and value, arguing that Canguilhem’s lesson – namely that scientific change is produced not only by similarity but also by opposition – may be applied also to the history of economic thought. I take as an example Adam Smith’s ‘discovery’ of social mechanisms vis-à-vis his sceptical mistrust of neo-Stoic and Platonic views of a world-order. (shrink)

This paper situates Hume's views on animals in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment by contrasting them with the views of Adam Smith. While Smith is more central to the philosophical establishment of the Scottish Enlightenment, their views on morals resemble each other greatly and both think that the analogies between humans and non-human animals are useful for thinking about morals. Their estimation of the nature and extent of those analogies, however, differ widely from one another. This has been historically (...) obscured by the fact that in no single work does Smith precisely detail what he thinks non-human animals are capable of. I argue that Smith thinks non-human animal minds are different in kind from human minds. This is evident from Smith's view of how language facilitates and co-creates certain aspects of human cognition. Hume, by contrast, seems to hold that non-human animal minds differ merely by degree from human minds. After reconstructing Smith's view, I contrast it with Hume's, providing historical context to show how Hume falls outside the mainstream on this issue and Smith within it. Their views on animals reflect, broadly, their standing with respect to the wider Scottish philosophical community. (shrink)

I argue that (i) even though Adam Smith’s four stages theory has been criticized with good reasons as both vitiated by undue generalization from modern Europe to the first stage and made bottom-heavy by assumptions of modern episteme, yet, in his writings an alternative view emerges where the savage is not just crushed under the weight of want and isolation but is endowed with imagination and sympathy; (ii) his picture of the fourth stage is, far from a triumphal apology of (...) Capitalism, a tragic diagnosis of an inner tension between ambition and greed and their unintended beneficial effects; (iii) the tensions in the picture are not just a report of tensions out there, but also depend on Smith’s pre-comprehension of the phenomena he tries to account for; (iv) and yet, the tragic character of this picture is to be credited to his integrity; I summarize peculiarities of Smith’s peculiar outlook, post-empiricism, as well as its potentialities (sect 2). I then reconstruct his view of development of language and science, suggesting that his theory of association of ideas and imagination provides a consistent account of both science and lore, yielding a comparatively less ethnocentric evaluation of the savage mind (sect. 3). I reconstruct his virtually twofold reconstruction of subsistence in the rude and early state, arguing that he tends to ascribe inability to evolve to want and isolation and describes his own view of evolution as a necessary path but also that in several passages imagination and sympathy do play a role also for the savage (sect. 4). I compare Smith’s view of the first stage with his diagnosis of commercial society arguing that his reconstruction is burdened by eighteenth-century ideology as well as by modern episteme and I conclude with an ambivalent appraisal of Smith’s comparison between the polished man and the savage. -/- . (shrink)

(2005). Wonder in the face of scientific revolutions: Adam Smith on Newton's ‘Proof’ of Copernicanism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 697-732. doi: 10.1080/09608780500293042.

Increasing the “truth per dollar” of money spent on science is one legitimate long-run goal of the economics of science. But before this goal can be achieved, we need to increase our knowledge of the successes and failures of past and current reward structures of science. This essay reviews what economists have learned about the behavior of scientists and the reward structure of science. One important use of such knowledge will be to help policy-makers create a reward structure that is (...) more efficient in the future. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, I explore the complex and unappreciated relationship between the moral and political thought of Cicero and Adam Smith. Cicero’s views about justice, propriety, and the selfish love of praise find new expression in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. I illustrate the important ways in which Smith adopts – often without attribution – Cicero’s precepts and moral judgments. I then go on to demonstrate how Smith strips those Ciceronian conclusions from their original justifying grounds in teleology and natural (...) law. In their place, Smith injects his own psychology based in sentiments as a new account of why it is that we prefer virtue and justice to their opposites. By exploring this relationship, I hope to shed light on an important dynamic whereby modern thought has creatively adapted classical moral and political concepts. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es, en primer lugar, exponer el análisis que Smith desarrolla en The History of Astronomy sobre el origen de las emociones de asombro y sorpresa. En este artículo se abordará, en segundo lugar, cómo Smith relaciona las características propias de un objeto o evento que produce asombro o sorpresa en el marco de las concepciones de los salvajes con relación al uso de la expresión “la mano invisible de Júpiter”. En tercer lugar, se analizará la (...) explicación que Smith brinda sobre lo que es el “curso ordinario de las cosas”. (shrink)

The article explores early criticisms of Adam Smith, with particular reference to long-distance commerce, the Portuguese empire, and the writings of William Julius Mickle. The changing relationship between merchants and sovereigns, and between economic and political power, was of central importance, the article suggests, to disputes over Smith's ideas of self-interest.

This article casts light on the intimate relationship between metaphysics and science in Adam Smith’s thought. Understanding this relationship can help in resolving an enduring dispute or misreading concerning the status and role of natural theology and the ‘invisible hand’ doctrine. In Smith’s scientific realism, ontological issues are necessary prerequisites for scientific inquiry, and metaphysical ideas thus play an organizing and regulatory role. Smith also recognized the importance of scientifically informed metaphysics in science’s historical development. In this sense, for Smith, (...) the metaphysico-scientific link, was a basic criterion of scientific validation by Inference to the Best Explanation. Furthermore, Smith’s comments implicitly suggest that in scientific progress there is a dialectic between metaphysics and science. These themes are illustrated primarily through his writings on the history of astronomy. (shrink)

Privileging deductive first principles over inductive contingencies, I argue, contributed to the economic meltdown of late and will continue to limit the range of reasonable solutions available to solve entrenched economic problems. I cite Toulmin’s critique of scientific certainty and the rancor over the demise of the ninth planet Pluto to posit a role for rhetoric in making valid claims across all fields of study, calling for more productive uncertainty subject to vigorous argumentation.

In this paper, I argue that, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith conflates two different meanings of ?self-command?, which is particularly puzzling because of the central role of this virtue in his theory. The first is the matrix of rational action, the one described in Part III of the TMS and learned in ?the great school of self-command?. The second is the particular moral virtue of self-command. Distinguishing between these two meanings allows us, on the one hand, to (...) solve some apparent paradoxes of the text; and, on the other, to identify various features of both the practical reason and deontological ethical traditions that are present in Smith's sentimentalism, enriching his phenomenological account of moral actions. (shrink)

The paper sheds fresh light on what Adam Smith was doing in writing the Wealth of Nations by looking at its place in his unaccomplished oeuvre. The Wealth of Nations is just a partial implementation of a part of his project: the history and theory of law and government. In this work, the ‘Socratic method” of persuasion and the “Newtonian method” of didactical discourse coexist with moral discourse. Such coexistence allows a smooth transition from (i) an argument aimed at persuading (...) the public opinion of the advantage carried by non-aggressive commercial policies, high wages and provision of public goods by the public authority to (ii) a simplified reconstruction of economic mechanisms and tendencies through either conjectural history or ‘systems”, and (iii) an argument showing how all the oppressive inequality existent in modern societies is, besides deplorable on whatever moral standard, contrary to everybody’s interest. (shrink)

La filosofía moral de Adam Smith se fundamenta en el papel de la imaginación para explicar el orden social en un nivel macro, y como mecanismo de identificación afectiva en un nivel micro. En ambos casos, el rol de la imaginación en nuestra psicología moral refuta la tesis de un homo economicus, o de que el ser humano está motivado a entrar en sociedad por su interés personal. Esto sirve de premisa para refutar la posición hobbesiana de un estado de (...) naturaleza histórico que está en la base de nuestros juicios morales que fundan la sociedad civil y la necesidad del magistrado. Adam Smith's moral philosophy is grounded in the role of the imagination in explaining the social order at a macro level and as a mechanism for affective identification at the micro level. In both cases, the role of the imagination in our moral psychology refutes the homo economicus thesis according to which human beings are motivated to enter into society due to personal interests. This premise serves to refute the Hobbesian position of a historical state of nature that underlies the moral judgments grounding civil society and the need for a magistrate. (shrink)

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the aesthetic strategy of the political philosophy of Edmund Burke, by considering the relation between the "artificial infinite" of the Enquiry Into our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and the "immemorial custom" of the Reflections on the Revolution in France. The argument addresses misreadings of Burke found in recent critical theories on the "aestheticism" of "bourgeois ideology.".

Scholars have sometimes argued that we should conceive of social research as a form of moral inquiry, at least in part, but none have made clear exactly how and why observational research can make a distinctive contribution to moral insight. Returning to an era before the modern distinction between social science and the humanities became entrenched, this article argues that Adam Smith provided a clear and forceful rationale for the moral role of social research, especially history. Smith believed that moral (...) understanding relies on emotional reactions to richly described cases, preferably where our own interests are not at stake. These meditations on particular cases, in turn, provide the basis for moral generalizations that can inform future encounters with particular cases. This perspective led Smith (along with his friend David Hume) to the view that historical writing makes a more important contribution to moral understanding than abstract philosophy does. This article reconstructs Smith’s arguments about the role of empirical observation in cultivating moral sensibility in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his Lectures on Jurisprudence, and his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. It then connects his argument to contemporary ideas about the nature of moral understanding in philosophy and cognitive science. (shrink)

Despite an initially warm reception, over the past two centuries assessments of the literary character of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations have gradually but unmistakably turned negative. This transformation in the public reception of Smith’s text began during his lifetime and culminated in Heilbroner’s assertion that Smith wrote with ‘an encyclopedic mind, but not with the precision of an orderly one’. However, where Heilbroner and many of his predecessors saw obscurity and tedious attention to minor detail, recent scholarship has (...) begun to perceive remarkable literary subtlety and nuance. This article continues and builds upon that project. It commences with an assessment of three competing explanations of Smith’s literary style and settles on a philosophic and pedagogic explanation of The Wealth of Nations’ distinctive composition. In discerning a unique heuristic strategy and philosophic object in the text, the article places particular emphasis on Smith’s employment of syntactic complexity, stylistic juxtaposition and elliptical citation. The article concludes, somewhat ironically, with the observation that The Wealth of Nations itself succumbed to the maladies of the emerging commercial world-view, in classroom and market place, that its careful construction aimed to ameliorate. (shrink)

A la luz de la ética de Lévinas, donde la muerte es presente y central en el concepto de responsabilidad fundamental para salvaguardar la humanidad, se puede observar la incidencia de la muerte en la formación del sentimiento y juicio moral en los escritos de Smith. La valoración del papel de la muerte en la teoría de los sentimientos morales mediante este estudio comparativo permite poner de relieve la función del cuidado de sí y del otro que subyace en su (...) teoría y percibir sus aportes posibles en las reflexiones y los debates éticos relacionados con la muerte y la vida. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: As Smith freed moral philosophy from former control bodies (the Church, the state), the Scottish philosopher opened the field for a scientific political economy. In his Adam Smith. Philosophie et Should then one wonder that his [Smith Mathiots reception in France. Mathiot sought to understand better the using a new character whom he claimed Smith was implicitly sketching, and whom he called . To Mathiots own philosophy.

This article examines Adam Smith’s views on animals, centering on the singularity of his economic perspective in the context of the general early ethical debate about animals. Particular emphasis is placed on his discussions of animals as property. The article highlights the tension between Smith’s moral sensitivity to animal suffering on the one hand, and his emphasis on the constitutive role that the utilization of animals played in the progress of civilization on the other. This tension is depicted as a (...) precursor of problematic aspects of the modern environmental crisis. (shrink)

La filosofía moral de Adam Smith se fundamenta en el papel de la imaginación para explicar el orden social en un nivel macro, y como mecanismo de identificación afec tiva en un nivel micro. En ambos casos, el rol de la imaginación en nuestra psicología moral refuta la tesis de un _homo economicus_, o de que el ser humano está motiva do a entrar en sociedad por su interés personal. Esto sirve de premisa para refutar la posición hobbesiana de un (...) estado de naturaleza histórico que está en la base de nuestros juicios morales que fundan la sociedad civil y la necesidad del magistrado. (shrink)