Scottish Enlightenment Research Articles

Polite Social Practices in 18th-century Scotland

This article explores the role and influence of elite women in 18th-century Scotland, focusing on their engagement with polite social practices during the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scottish Enlightenment, characterized by its integration of various disciplines and emphasis on both theoretical and practical knowledge, was a period of significant cultural intellectual development. Central to this movement was the concept of politeness, which shaped the social interactions of the elite and played a crucial role in their personal and societal advancement. Elite women were integral to the social fabric of this era, participating in mixed-gender activities and shaping the cultural landscape through their involvement in social gatherings, education, and print culture. Despite being formally excluded from public office and direct political power, these women exercised significant influence through social networks, family ties, and patronage, subtly navigating the political and intellectual currents of their time. The study highlights how these women, while adhering to socially accepted norms, found ways to circumvent formal exclusions, thereby contributing to the broader cultural and political life of Scotland. Their participation in polite sociability not only facilitated their integration into elite society but also played a vital role in the broader program of social improvement that characterized the Scottish Enlightenment. This article underscores the complex interplay between gender, power, and politics, revealing how elite women helped shape “The Golden Age” of Scotland through their engagement in polite social practices.

Ancient Sources in Adam Smith’s Theories of Sympathetic Morality and Imagination: Aristotle’s Thought and The Theory of Moral Sentiments

This essay considers the profound influence of Aristotle’s philosophy on Adam Smith’s theories of sympathetic morality and imagination. In particular, it examines how Smith’s theories, often seen as Stoic, align with Aristotelian concepts; also, it analyses Smith’s interpretation of wonder as more than a philosophical catalyst, but also as a force that enhances sensitivity to virtue and informs moral judgement: which is similar to Aristotle’s view of wonder as the genesis of philosophical and scientific inquiry. Consequently, Smith’s understanding of imagination is seen as a transformative cognitive faculty similar to Aristotle’s idea of it as an innate capacity for mental imagery and sensory perception. This juxtaposition underscores the role of the imagination as a creative dynamics that transcends individual perspective and captures the essence of human experience. Smith’s integration of Aristotelian thought represents thus a distinctive and nuanced contribution to the classical legacy within the Scottish Enlightenment, shaping a deeper understanding of moral and philosophical inquiry.

Quiddity College: Thomas Jefferson's Legacy for Moral Science

William Stephenson clearly regarded this manuscript as one of his major works, an inevitable outcome of his life-long involvement in education. Given his commitment to the importance of subjective science, Stephenson felt the need for him to anticipate what kind of education it should entail, to focus his attention on how subjectivity might be cultivated. Quiddity College is his answer. It describes a two-year college curriculum in which facts are taken for granted – prior to entering Quiddity College students would have already acquired a grounding in physics, chemistry, genetics, etcetera, and everything subjective would be fostered in the College. Part I, drawing on his own experience of both British and North American practices, provides a critique of existing systems at College and University levels. It continues with a presentation of his ideas about subjectivity and the role it should play in an ideal College. The notions of play and communication-pleasure are central to his vision. Part II outlines a curriculum for Quiddity rooted in principles from the Scottish Enlightenment and taught by the seven Fellows of Quiddity College, named after Thomas Jefferson and members of his circle such as Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestley, David Rittenhouse, and Benjamin Rush.

Observații filosofice despre arhitectura religioasă și arta sacră

This article tackles the aesthetic implications of religious architecture, somehow outshined by dominant metaphysical undertakings of the sacred space. The first part of this study deals with the interpretation of the principles of religious architecture explained by Vitruvius and their impact on the German and Scottish Enlightenment. The second part sheds light on the Kantian approach of the religious space through the aesthetic category of the sublime in its two paradigms – mathematical and dynamical – closely observing to what extent they support Kant’s intention to project religion within the limits of reason. From here, the research tracks the inheritance of these traditions reflected by Hegel’s Lectures of Aesthetics, for whom the architecture is embedded in the so-called symbolic art, one of the three major components of the system of arts. In the end, we will see how modern philosophy leaves a last trace of interest on religious architecture and the phenomenon of living in some Heideggerian writings, but without any aesthetic intention. We will check what the possibility of a theological program of religious architecture still means at the end of modernity, relying on some notes of Le Corbusier, and how we can recover a traditional model of religious architecture, which can explain the aesthetic experience beyond the metaphysical one, in the Eastern Orthodox Romanian mental space.

Investigating the Relationship between Religion and Morality: Insight from Hume

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between religion and morality. David Hume, an influential figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, provides insightful contributions to this discourse through his philosophical works. This article explores Hume's nuanced views on the relationship between religion and morality, drawing from his key texts such as "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" and "An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals." Hume challenges the traditional notion that religion is a necessary foundation for morality. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he argues that moral principles do not derive from religious doctrine or divine commandments but instead from human sentiment and reason. Hume contends that moral judgments are based on a natural sense of empathy and utility rather than religious authority. Furthermore, Hume critiques the idea that religion is essential for maintaining moral order within society. He suggests that religious beliefs and institutions may, in fact, be detrimental to morality by promoting superstition, intolerance, and dogmatism. Hume advocates for a secular approach to morality, where ethical principles are grounded in rational reflection and social cooperation rather than religious doctrine. While Hume challenges the traditional link between the two, he acknowledges the historical influence of religion on moral development and societal norms. Hume recognizes the social utility of religion in fostering moral virtues and promoting social cohesion, albeit without attributing morality exclusively to religious sources.

FROM SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT TO TRIPARTITE THEORY

: In today’s political philosophy framework, it is commonplace to associate Adam Smith with akind of theory that ignores human dispositions and considers only the self-interested perspective ofindividuals. Although this view has been widely supported in different fields – viz Philosophy andEconomy, we consider this a biased interpretation. Using the Cambridge School orientation, we explainthe importance of historical background in reading Smith’s work to argue that Smith’s writings should beinterpreted within the Scottish Enlightenment context. From this contextual approach, it is possible tosustain an integrated reading of Smith’s books The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) and An Inquiryinto the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations (WN). This reading leads to a more faithfulinterpretation of Smith’s idea that the agent in society is morally engaged in socio-economic relations.Once this hypothesis is confirmed, we will defend a systematic analysis of Smith’s philosophy arguingthat Smith’s philosophy is a holistic system, in what we call a tripartite theory.

The Business of Race-making in the Torrid Zone: Dr Jonathan Troup’s Illustrated Diary of Dominica, 1789–90

This article focuses on the manuscript diary of a Scottish doctor, Jonathan Troup, who during a truncated fifteen-month period, from 1789 to 1790, practised medicine on the island of Dominica, part of the climatic ‘torrid zone’ in the British West Indies. While the relevant textual contents of his diary are already familiar to scholars of medical humanities, the analysis seeks to complement and extend these existing discussions by addressing an aspect of the illustrated and inscribed pages of Troup’s diary that has not been previously discussed, namely his diurnal account of race-making. The article argues that Troup was a product of Scottish enlightenment medical training, with its blended curricula of medicine, natural history and moral philosophy. The diary in turn, is shown to be a product of the diagnostic tools of that education, which equipped practitioners with the skills to classify human diversity through careful observation in the ‘colonial field’. In his diurnal sketches, Troup employs a tiered racial system or calculus of colour to differentiate between peoples of different races, based on the visual proximity of their skin to either European whiteness or shades of blackness associated with African descent. In the textual descriptions that variously accompany, envelope, elucidate and ignore the drawings, Troup’s race-making schema is shown to be informed by factors other than the gradations of skin complexion, including social temper and moral temperament. Such factors are given particular prominence in his discussion of multi-racial women, making gender an innate constituent of his race-making schema. The article is framed by the concept of business, which for most professionals in the Caribbean involved more than one economic occupation. It offers a prognosis as to the significance of Troup’s diary for a range of academic disciplines, historical, literary and visual, and their discreet historiographies which pertain to his imperial careering.

Moderation in the Scottish Enlightenment: the case of Robert Wallace

ABSTRACT Robert Wallace (1697–1771) was a leading minister of the Church of Scotland, but he remains a largely overlooked figure in the literature. Nevertheless, his participation in philosophical and theological debates offers a glimpse of the complex positions of the Scottish clergy – and of Scottish moderation on its own terms. Wallace’s moderation was evident, for example, in his opposition both to radical deism and orthodox dogmatism. Yet what makes Wallace’s case particularly interesting is that he described himself as a ‘moderate freethinker’ in a letter to David Hume, while distinguishing elsewhere the ‘moderate’ and ‘sober’ freethinkers from the dangerously sceptical ones. Exploring his consistent statements on this issue in various writings throughout his career, this article investigates the self-identified moderation of Wallace – in opposition, for example, to his rival freethinker William Dudgeon – and thus the clergy’s attempt to use this category in the shaping of their vision of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The Evolution of Scottish Enlightenment Publishing

AbstractThis article uses large-scale bibliographic data to extract and analyse the works, authors, and publishers of the Scottish Enlightenment. By doing so, we aim to encompass a wider scope and definition of Scottish Enlightenment publishing, contextualizing both the major and the lesser-known publishers. We reveal two competing models for key Scottish publishers: those working in Scotland, publishing works that were printed later in London; and those working in London, printing Scottish works. We show that the careers of key publishers such as Andrew Millar (1705–68) should be considered in relational terms: that Millar must be understood in the context of his wider network, taking into account a longer view of the publishing landscape both before and after his career. Moreover, we establish the relevance of subsequent editions of existing works for the understanding of eighteenth-century publishing. The article also argues for an agnostic view of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment text’, one which considers the features of individual texts rather than a priori assumptions about canonical works. Consequently, we show that the significance of works of scientific improvement evolves and becomes intertwined with education, literature, philosophy, and history over time; resulting in a convergence of practice, theory, and literary expression.

Enlightenment Rhetoric Reconsidered: Hume’s Discursive Transcendence in “Of Eloquence”

ABSTRACT The phrase “Enlightenment rhetoric” typically denotes discourses bent on rejecting classical oratorical styles in favor of purportedly scientific ones. Likewise, scholars often associate Enlightenment rhetorical styles with the scientific epistemologies that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article reconsiders Enlightenment rhetoric by analyzing David Hume’s 1742 essay “Of Eloquence.” More specifically, the article argues that the Scottish Enlightenment context necessitated a rhetoric that compensated for the discursive limitations of new scientific worldviews. In so doing, the article argues that Hume verbalizes the transcendent dimension of classical eloquence in ways commensurate with the emphasis on perspicuity emerging in English culture, a rhetorical maneuver that the author calls discursive transcendence. Hume’s “Of Eloquence” thus serves as a case study demonstrating how an Enlightenment writer advanced a rhetoric that both rejects and pulls from prior rhetorical traditions, constituting a new understanding of Enlightenment rhetoric.

The Scottish Enlightenment and the Father of Russian Jurisprudence

Abstract Desnitskii was the leading explicator in Catherine II’s Russia of British thought, especially that of the Scottish Enlightenment, and of British institutions, an influential teacher, and a socially engaged intellectual. The author, in earlier work, showed that Chapter 22 of Catherine’s Nakaz was directly influenced by Desnitskii and, indirectly, by the Moscow University Law professor’s esteemed Glasgow teacher, Adam Smith. This new article draws on digitized archival sources to cast additional light on the Scottish education of Desnitskii and his colleague Ivan Tret’iakov – on the professors with whom they interacted, the lectures they attended, and the books they read. Desnitskii was profoundly influenced by Smith and by Law Professor John Millar, and well acquainted with the inventor James Watt whom he urged Catherine to invite to Russia. In his extensive reform proposals to the Empress, Desnitskii especially championed the raznochintsy, seeking a role for them in the governing of Russia.

‘If I Do Not Satisfy My Present Inclination in Writing, It is Very Probable I May Haunt you’: Astral Projection in Bluestocking Letters (1740–1770)

ABSTRACT This article examines the concept of ‘astral projection’ in the letters of the Bluestocking intellectuals Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800), Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), and Catherine Talbot (1721–1770). By this term, I am referring to episodes in their correspondence in which they imaginatively project themselves into the physical presence of the letter’s reader, or deploy images of death and haunting to poetically bridge social distance. Exploring this concept through the frameworks of Susan Lanser’s engagement with Bluestocking Queerness, as well as the concept of material remediation of affect drawn from Sarah Ahmed and others, I would like to address this technique as a device for the affective bridging of distance, as well as exploring the central case study of Elizabeth Montagu’s use of astral projection in her letters to Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, Henry Home, Lord Kames, in which astral projection is utilised to bridge not just physical distance, but the barriers of social status, and Montagu’s own outsider status from Scottish Enlightenment philosophical circles. Ultimately, I argue that astral projection acts as a synecdoche for the familiar letter as a uniquely transformative textual space, in which meanings of all kinds are renegotiated and redefined, including the meaning of distance and separation.

The ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment in Russia: Adam Smith and Semyon Efimovich Desnitskii on the philosophy of history

The paper focuses on the mutual interaction as well as the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on the formation of the Enlightenment in Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great. It focuses on the relationship between the work of Adam Smith and Semyon Efimovich Desnitskii, who, thanks to Desnitskii’s studies at the University of Glasgow, got to know each other as teacher and student. The central point of their interaction is the issues of the philosophy of history based on natural-law assumptions and focus on understanding the formation of history, culture, citizenship, and social transformations through morality and law. The paper examines Desnitskii’s ideas on the stages of human coexistence in which Smith’s concept is projected. The paper is not only an attempt to compare these concepts, but it also characterizes Desnitskii’s interest in adapting the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment to Russian reality and needs and using them in the environment of the advancing feudal empire, to which Desnitskii wants to contribute with his work.

The Religious Formation of John Witherspoon: Calvinism, Evangelicalism, and the Scottish Enlightenment by Kevin DeYoung (review)

The Religious Formation of John Witherspoon: Calvinism, Evangelicalism, and the Scottish Enlightenment by Kevin DeYoung (review)

Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s In Praise of Shadows and critical transparency

ABSTRACT Mainstream reception of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s literary essay In’ei Raisan/ In Praise of Shadows (1933) has tended to swing between writing it off as a nostalgic nationalist exceptionalism and marketing it as a melancholic hymn to everyday beauty, although recently much more nuanced positions have emerged in terms of the text’s aesthetic ‘authenticity’. There is much more at stake in In’ei Raisan, however, including a perception of the evisceration of negativity and a surrender to a cybernetically foreclosed, capital-driven future, and this should be located relative to much older and much newer concerns. This themescape becomes more obvious when the essay’s driving image of the shadow is understood as part of a long negotiation to the total control of space by a property-owning subject, whose rise had been naturalised as progress during Japan’s unification and ‘modernisation’, primarily via a British empire which was morally sustained by a Scottish Enlightenment ‘empiricism of history’. This unification of, and dominion over, space gives In’ei Raisan such extraordinary similarities to the field recently identified as Critical Transparency Studies, similarities which are explored here.

A New Order of "Me And Other" Relationship in The Scottish Enlightenment Tradition: Courtesy

Etik coşku ile ekonomik nesnelliğin birlikte harmanlandığı sivil toplum yapılanmasıyla hayâtiyet bulan İskoç Aydınlanması insanlık tarihini önemli derecede etkilemiştir. Yerleşik pek çok şeyin devre dışı bırakılmasına neden olan bu dönem, insan ve evrensel insan doğası bilimi ile birlikte tarihin yeniden kurgulanmasına neden olarak günümüz yaşamının ağırlık merkezini de önemli ölçüde belirlemiştir. Bu bağlamda çalışmamız, söz konusu paradigmayı ve buna bağlı rafine davranışları nezaket (politeness) kavramı üzerinden ele almayı amaçlar. İskoç Aydınlanma geleneğinde nezaket, yüksek ideallere dayalı geleneksel hiyerarşik toplumlardan farklı olarak “ben ve başkası” arasındaki geçerli ilişkinin eşitlikçi ve sosyal formunu temsil eder. Bu bağlamda nezaket ile ben ve başkası arasındaki ilişki etik bir diyalog üzerine kurulur. Kamusal alanda başkası ile “Nasıl yaşamalıyız?” sorusunun cevabının aranmasında oldukça önemli bir yere sahip nezaket Batı toplumları için gündelik davranış formundan çok daha fazlasını içererek yeni dünya görüşü ve buna bağlı medeniyete giden yolun habercisi olmuştur. Nihayetinde ben ve başkası ilişkisi bakımından eşitliğe dayalı yeni bir ethos inşa edilmiştir. Fakat yeni durumun pek çok fırsatı beraberinde getirdiği görülse de yaşamın etik senfonisini dengeleyecek sağduyuyu oluşturmada vadettiği gerekli başarıyı sağladığını söylemek mümkün görünmemektedir.

The Scottish Enlightenment and the Remaking of Modern History

AbstractThis article offers a new interpretation of the history-writing produced in Enlightenment Scotland. It argues that after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 was blamed on Scotland's ‘feudal’ institutions, Scottish jurists and historians began to interrogate what it meant to become 'modern'. Instead of accepting the Whig claim that England provided the ideal model for social and political development, they subsumed English history into a broader debate about whether and how modern Europe had emerged from its feudal past. By reconstructing this debate, the article shows how Scots rewrote European history in ways that subverted the English whig tradition while rejecting universal or ‘cosmopolitan’ explanations of social progress. In doing so, the article reopens the question of how the Scottish Enlightenment shaped British imperial culture across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The Great Synthesizer: Natural Rights, the Law of Nations, and the Moral Sense in the Philosophical and Constitutional Thought of James Wilson

Abstract This article argues that the key to understanding James Wilson, one of the leading architects of the Constitution and the first Supreme Court Justice to be sworn in, and yet arguably the most neglected and misunderstood figure from the founding generation, is as a “great synthesizer” of seemingly disparate philosophical and constitutional commitments. Drawing upon the natural rights tradition of early classical liberalism as envisioned by John Locke, Wilson insisted that the new federal government be as democratic and broadly reflective of “We the People” as possible. Drawing upon the law of nations tradition as articulated particularly by Cicero, he became one of the nation's leading proponents of a strong, centralized federal government in order to form “a more perfect union.” And inspired by the concept of the moral sense and the innate sociality of the human person as discussed in the Scottish Enlightenment by Thomas Reid and Francis Hutcheson, he made clear that the “blessings of liberty” were contingent upon an active and engaged citizenry on the national level. By understanding this overlooked, synthetic quality of Wilson's thought, we may better understand, in all its richness and complexity, the unique role Wilson played in America's creation story, gain a new perspective on the original Constitution itself, its achievements and flaws, and reconstruct a compelling constitutional theory that cut across the political alignment of the day but perhaps better anticipated subsequent constitutional development than any of the prevailing positions in 1787.

The relationship between social life and emotions. Adam Ferguson and sociology.

Adam Ferguson has a leading position among those who have developed a sociological interpretation of modernity that dismiss metaphysics without following the echoes of rationalism. Ferguson outlines a vision of social life that correlates the analysis of individual behavior to the study of social context and institutions. Consistently with this approach, the Scottish scholar emphasizes the multidimensionality of human beings without forgetting the non-rational features of social behavior. This essay aims to discuss Ferguson's thought with a special attention to the importance of the emotions in social life, so as to enhance the contribution of classical sociology to the analysis of the emotionality. Ferguson, in fact, argues that emotions have a leading role in shaping the behaviors and values of individuals. Developed in the context of Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson's sociology shows how the study of modern society can be reconciled with a reasonable as well as emotional approach to social life.

A Theory of the Enlightenment in Late Eighteenth-Century Sweden: Nils von Rosenstein and Scotland’s Science of Man and Politics

ABSTRACT Nils von Rosenstein’s Försök til en afhandling om uplysningen, til dess beskaffenhet, nytta och nödvändighet för samhället (An Attempt at a Dissertation on the Enlightenment, its Character, Usefulness and Necessity for Society), published in 1793, presents an unusually comprehensive theory of ‘the Enlightenment’ (Upplysningen) from a contemporary of the period. This article explores the impact of Enlightenment ideas in late eighteenth-century Sweden through the case study of Rosenstein and his remarkable text. While deepening our understanding of the Enlightenment in Sweden, it also expands our knowledge of the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment abroad, the scholarship on which has been mainly focused on Germany. Sweden is further shown to be a fruitful case study for considering the politicization of the late Enlightenment independently of the French Revolution. The French Revolution formed a key part of the political backdrop to the publication of the Dissertation, but its intellectual content was more indebted to the Scottish Enlightenment. Rosenstein’s pragmatic and contextual approach to politics is often explained away by the precarious climate after Gustav III’s assassination. Instead, this article shows that it is better understood as a style of thought which Rosenstein had in common with the leading thinkers of eighteenth-century Scotland.