Against those who identify genealogy with reductive genealogical debunking or deny it any evaluative and action-guiding significance, I argue for the following three claims: that although genealogies, true to their Enlightenment origins, tend to trace the higher to the lower, they need not reduce the higher to the lower, but can elucidate the relation between them and put us in a position to think more realistically about both relata; that if we think of genealogy’s normative significance in terms of a (...) triadic model that includes the genealogy’s addressee, we can see that in tracing the higher to the lower, a genealogy can facilitate an evaluation of the higher element, and where the lower element is some important practical need rather than some sinister motive, the genealogy can even be vindicatory; and finally, that vindicatory genealogies can offer positive guidance on how to engineer better concepts. (shrink)

Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? This book presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts (...) across the analytic-continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having. (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)

The aim of this thesis is to explore the place of physical geography in Scottish Enlightenment accounts of stadial theory. It does this through examining the historical works of the following authors: Adam Ferguson, Henry Home,, John Millar and Adam Smith. Stimulated by the 1748 publication of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws each of these individuals presented distinctive explanations for historical progress. Conventional interpretations of Scottish Enlightenment accounts of stadial theory have tended to stress how these were informed by debates (...) over moral conduct and political practice in line with the rise of commercial society. However, these approaches have neglected to consider the place of physical geography within Scottish Enlightenment accounts of historical progress. Consequently, this thesis aims to amend this picture and demonstrate how physical geography provided further insight into the arguments deployed by stadial theorists. This thesis will therefore be structured in the following way. In the introductory chapter, the focus will be on Montesquieu’s understanding of physical geography within the Spirit of the Laws, in demonstrating that his account provided key insights into the differences between European and Asiatic societies which Scottish Enlightenment authors would draw from in order to develop their individual arguments. The second chapter will focus on the work of Adam Ferguson and his An Essay on the History of Civil Society. In the process, it will demonstrate how he used physical geography to illustrate the way social stability was rooted in civic virtue. In the third chapter, Henry Home’s Sketches of the History of Man will be examined. It will be argued that physical geography allowed Kames to demonstrate a sceptical interpretation of societal progress which culminated in an ambiguous view of humanity. The final chapter considers the place of physical geography in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence and the Wealth of Nations. In addition to this, this chapter will consider the work of John Millar as an example of the legacy of Smith’s argument and how it informed accounts of physical geography in stadial theory written after the Lectures. Doing so it demonstrates Smith’s understanding of physical geography to be concerned with the way historical progress was conditioned by local influences. This thesis will therefore argue that physical geography provides a way of viewing Scottish Enlightenment accounts of stadial theory which use the premise that societal development was intrinsically linked to a range of physical factors including location, climate, topography and fertility. (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)

It can be said that Rousseau is one of the most acute thinkers of the corruption of civilisation. In fact, the Second Discourse and the Essay on the Origins of Languages could be read as elaborate analyses of advancing social and cultural decline inasmuch as mankind is continually moving away from the original state of natural innocence. But Rousseau’s idea of corruption is not straightforward. I try to show that in the Essay, Rousseau emphasizes the natural causes for corruption. I (...) argue that an opposition between necessity and contingency, which more accurately represents the two modes operating in Rousseau’s doctrine, should replace the standard nature/culture divide. The contingency of natural catastrophes is found to be ultimately responsible for the corruption in the social realm, which is therefore largely driven by natural causes. (shrink)

Any ethical argument involving the problems of access to assisted reproductive technologies should entail the discussion of the decision protocol and consider the individual deliberating on the appropriateness of these remedies from the point of view of self and community. Yet, arguments based on patients' own moral calculations are rare in the bioethics literature. The moral voice behind most discourses concerning ARTs is that of an outwardly independent spectator, who nonetheless proceeds to justify a personally significant worldview in the utilization (...) of these resources. Investigators grounded in social and legal sciences have offered relevant arguments in this regard, but because their discourses are derived from research protocols specific to their respective disciplines, they fail to provide a general rationale applicable to moral deliberation. (shrink)

The Enlightenment regarded language as one of the most significant achievements of man. Consequently inquiries into the origin and development of language play a central role in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. This new science of man consciously adopts the method of analysis and synthesis used in the natural sciences of the time. In moral philosophy, analysis corresponds to the search for the basic principles of human nature. Synthesis is identified with the attempt to interpret all artificial achievements of man (arts, sciences (...) and institutions) as the effect of these principles and of man's physical and social environment - an attempt known as theoretical history. The type of explanation envisaged by theoretical historians is based on the principle of causality. It consists in a genetic reconstruction of the social phenomenon under investigation. Inquiries into the origin of language follow this pattern of explanation. They form part of theoretical history and thus represent a major aspect of the eighteenth-century scientific study of man. (shrink)

One of the most important works of the Enlightenment—in the first new, unabridged English translation in more than two centuries Published in four volumes between 1784 and 1791, Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind is one of the most important works of the Enlightenment—a bold, original, and encyclopedic synthesis of, and contribution to, the era’s philosophical debates over nature, history, culture, and the very meaning of human experience. This is the first new, unabridged English translation of (...) the Ideas in more than two centuries. Gregory Martin Moore’s lively, modern English text, extensive introduction, and commentary bring this neglected masterpiece back to life. The Ideas—which engages with many of the leading thinkers of the eighteenth century, such as Montesquieu, Kant, Gibbon, Ferguson, Buffon, and Rousseau—is many things at once: an inquiry into the unity and purpose of history, a reflection on human nature and the place of humans in the cosmic order, an examination of what was beginning to be called “culture,” and a narrative of cultural progress across time among different peoples. Along the way, Herder considers a dizzying variety of topics, including the formation of the earth and solar system, species change, race, the immortality of the soul, the establishment of society, and the pursuit of happiness. Above all, the Ideas is an anthropology—what Alexander Pope had termed an “essay on man”—pervaded by an appropriately humane spirit. A fresh and much-needed modern translation of the complete Ideas, this volume reintroduces English readers to a classic of Enlightenment thought. (shrink)

Summary This paper notes and explores the attraction of Dugald Stewart's moral philosophy for women readers and a few women writers. Student lecture notes reveal the chronological development of his ideas, as he drew upon the works of Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, and responded to political events. Particular attention is paid to Stewart's comments relating to women and gender, through discussions of education, the institution of marriage, and population questions. After 1800, he shifted away from a speculative (...) conjectural history towards a philosophy of moral progress rooted in common sense philosophy and a belief in perfectibility. He taught a system of practical morality relevant to the education of children and strongly emphasised the importance of the association of ideas in childhood. For women readers, the message was contradictory in that he united an apparently conservative reinforcement of the relations of the sexes with a belief in the improvement of the condition of women through education in a modern, progressive, and commercial society. (shrink)

The conventional interpretation of Adam Smith is that he is a prophet of commercialism. The liberal capitalist reading of Smith is consistent with the view that history culminates in commercial society. The first part of the article develops this optimistic interpretation of Smith's view of history. Smith implies that commercial society is the end of history because (1) it supplies the ends of nature that he identifies; (2) it is inevitable; and (3) it is permanent. The second part of the (...) article shows that Smith has some dark moments in his writings where he seems to reject completely such teleological notions. In this more civic humanist mood he confesses that commercial society does not supply the ends of nature, nor is it inevitable, nor is it permanent. Both views exist in Smith and the commentator is forced to choose between passages in Smith's work in order to support a particular interpretation of the former's view of history. (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)

Few, if any, intellectual cultural and political movements—for the Enlightenment was all of those things—have proved to be so consistently contentious and lastingly influential yet so hard to defin...

The Confucian tradition, which places the virtue of ren or fellow feeling at its heart as a ‘gateway’ to the more concrete virtues of common Western parlance, offers a potential antidote to the excesses of a Western business ethics which, even after its recent academic reembrace of the Aristotelian tradition, in practice still too often instrumentalises virtue in the service of a ‘rational’ or ‘reasonable’ constraining of the profit motive. The deeper, intrinsic ‘ethos’ promised by a Confucian approach also finds (...) its echo in the West in the work of Hans Küng’s Weltethos project, led today on the business ethics front by Klaus Leisinger and Claus Dierksmeier. This paper explores a dilemma at the heart of the World Ethos movement seen from the twin peaks of the World Ethics Institute at Peking University and the Weltethos Institut at the University of Tübingen: namely, whether a business ethics culture accustomed to thinking in terms of CSR-esque lists of corporate values, virtues or principles can best be reformed via documents like the UN Global Compact, the 2010 Global Economic Ethic Manifesto, or even the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or whether a more radical, revolutionary quest for an inner ‘ethos’, to be lived and experienced by self-cultivating individuals engaged in business all over the world regardless of background, ought somehow to be undertaken parallel to these endeavours. The authors outline possible steps towards such a transformation of the management community’s understanding of virtue, without, however, dismissing the contribution of traditional, dilemma-oriented Western thinking about applied ethics in general, and business ethics in particular. (shrink)

In eighteenth‐century Britain, there was more than one way of thinking about poverty. For some, poverty was an essentially moral problem. Another way of conceiving of poverty was in economic terms. In this article, however, I want to consider some eighteenth‐century versions of the idea that poverty might be a political issue. What I have in mind is the idea that a society containing a large proportion of very poor people might be, just for that reason, an unstable and disordered (...) society. I argue, first, that this idea is central to Smith's treatment of poverty in The Wealth of Nations. Then, after a brief account of how Paine and Godwin imagined the end of poverty, I describe the further development and refinement of Smithian lines of thought in Burke and Malthus. My conclusion is that Smith, Burke, and Malthus constitute evidence that present‐day ideas of social justice derive more from the nineteenth century and subsequent developments in moral and political thought than from the early modern period. (shrink)

The nineteenth-century British historian Lucy Aikin's ambitious four-part poem Epistles on Women (1810) marks both her first important contribution to women's historiography and a compelling example of Enlightenment feminist historiography. To some extent, Aikin is building on the work of male Enlightenment historians who had evaluated the status of women in different times and places and correlated it to social progress. However, she not only restricts her focus exclusively to women, but also makes a concerted effort to resolve some of (...) the tensions apparent in previous accounts of the relationship between women and social progress. Especially striking is her mediation of two distinct historical models of femininity, which I have called the republican and commercial models of femininity, the outlines of both of which we can trace in the work of male Enlightenment historians. By suggesting that through proper education women might combine the best aspects of each model, Aikin strategically advances the project of controversial feminists like Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, who had taken inspiration from the republican model of femininity in their demands for improvements to female education. ☆ Revised for the History of European Ideas, October 2, 2004 by Kathryn Ready. (shrink)

La historicidad, la adaptación continua de la vida humana a problemas puntuales es el marco –antropológico– en el que la Ilustración escocesa inscribe su reflexión moral. Un trabajo continuo de adecuación al medio generalmente expuesto a través de una concepción por etapas de la historia, cuyo fruto, objetivado como leyes, normas o morales, no es nunca buscado y sí producto de las consecuencias inesperadas de decisiones que se toman sin referentes seguros en su diseño inicial. Esa contextualización, cuyo motor es (...) la perfectibilidad humana, en último término supone la atención a los distintos intereses y esferas de la vida, lo cual hace que la reflexión moral quede parcelada en las pequeñas esferas donde aparecen esos intereses; este será el motivo que llevará a la Ilustración escocesa a buscar algún tipo de universalidad que se complaciera de forma natural en el resultado de aquel artificial proceso de adaptación histórica al medio. (shrink)

In both the public and the business world, in academe as well as in practice, the ideas of Adam Smith are regarded as the bedrock of modern economics. When present economic conditions and management practices are criticised, Adam Smith is referred to by defenders and detractors of the current status quo alike. Smith, it is believed, defined the essential terms of reference of these debates, such as the rational pursuit of self-interest on part of the individual and the resultant optimal (...) allocation of goods in free markets thanks to the workings of an “invisible hand.” In this article, we question whether this standard view of Smith, the economist, is tenable. We provide an extensive review of the extant secondary literature from economists, business ethicists, and philosophers, comparing their assessments to crucial elements of Smith’s theoretical system. As a result, we show that Smith, far from being an advocate of a value-free or even value-averse conception of economic transactions, stood for a virtue-based and values-oriented model of business. Accordingly, we argue current management education and the pedagogy of business ethics ought to be changed, and certain strategic conclusions drawn for business practice. (shrink)

SUMMARYThis essay combines the study of Humboldt's sources with a critique of the treatment of this subject in most studies of Humboldt and his linguistic thought. One crucial issue is the date of his early ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’, which is our first evidence of his mature thinking about language. This text is conventionally dated 1795, thus ruling out that Humboldt might be indebted to the anthropo-linguistic philosophy that he explored in Paris a few years later. But a host of (...) facts make the date untenable and the debt unquestionable, including incontrovertible evidence that ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’ relies on Condillac's argument for the anti-idealist principle that the distinction between subject and object is the absolute precondition for self-awareness and reflection, and thus, by the same token, for the concept of Weltansicht. ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’ also shows that Humboldt was inspired to choose Condillac's and Destutt de Tracy's argument over that of Fichte for what Berkeley disapprovingly called ‘outness’. This analysis exemplifies the critique that is advanced in this essay. (shrink)

Historians of ideas have, frequently, misunderstood the founders of liberalism. Often, they say that authors like Adam Smith or Turgot are inconsistent in their adherence to a supposed .principle of state non-intervention., since they find that those classic authors defend many examples of public intervention in the economy. But the truth is that none of the great economists, whether French or British, have ever professed such an absurd principle as that of non-intervention. They have, however, defended vigorously other rival principles, (...) such as the state.s defence of natural rights, public utility or laisser-faire, which should not be confused with non-intervention. (shrink)

O texto pretende fazer uma exposição panorâmica das principais concepções de história do espírito dos filósofos britânicos, desde Locke até os autores do final do século XVIII. A partir daí pretende-se mostrar que a unidade entre esses filósofos é apenas aparente. Pois, apesar das semelhanças, as diferenças que há entre as concepções e orientações metodológicas destes autores são suficientes para atestar que estamos diante projetos filosóficos muito distintos. The aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive outlook of the (...) conceptions of history of mind proposed by the british philosophers from Locke to the end of the XVIII century. It aims to show that, despite the seeming resemblances, the differences among those conceptions are sufficient to enable us to identify different philosophical projects. (shrink)

In the late 1740s a young man who had just returned from Oxford to his native Scotland gave a series of lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres in Edinburgh. This man was no other than Adam Smith, who would soon become famous for his writings about moral philosophy and, most of all, economic issues. Smith the moral philosopher and Smith the economist quickly overshadowed Smith the theoretician of rhetoric. Even in today’s scholarly perception the curious fact that the founder of (...) economics made his first public appearance as a lecturer on rhetoric is not given the attention it deserves. This means that an important resource for understanding Smith’s self-conception as an author and the society he envisaged is .. (shrink)

This bibliography covers the Hume literature for 2010, and follows upon the annual update begun by Rolland Hall for the years 1977 through 1985 and continued by William Edward Morris for 1986 through 2003. This installment, like previous ones, excludes items published in Hume Studies, which are indexed annually in each November issue. Readers of Hume Studies may contact me at [email protected] with additions or corrections to any previous year, which can be noted in future installments. I am grateful to (...) all who have provided input on an earlier draft of this bibliography that was posted on the Internet. Aside from the yearly bibliographies published in Hume Studies, readers may find the following bibliographical .. (shrink)