The Scottish Enlightenment

Description

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

Alexander Broadie is a Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow University - a chair once occupied by Adam Smith - and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has published many books on Scottish thought.

'an accessible primer on the main ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment' - Edinburgh Review'direct, considered ... [gets] down to the nuts and bolts of how the Enlightenment worked' - Scottish Affairs