The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment

Description

The second edition of this Companion presents a philosophical perspective on an eighteenth-century phenomenon that has had a profound influence on Western culture. A distinguished team of contributors examines the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson and other Scottish thinkers. Their subjects range across philosophy, natural theology, economics, anthropology, natural science, and law and the arts, and in addition, they relate the Scottish Enlightenment to its historical context and assess its impact and legacy. The result is a comprehensive and accessible volume that illuminates the richness, the intellectual variety and the underlying unity of this important movement. This volume contains five entirely new chapters on morality, the human mind, aesthetics, sentimentalism and political economy, and eleven other chapters have been significantly revised and updated. The book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy, theology, literature and the history of ideas.

Alexander Broadie is Honorary Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. His books include The Circle of John Mair: Logic and Logicians in Pre-Reformation Scotland (1985), The Shadow of Scotus: Philosophy and Faith in Pre-Reformation Scotland (1995), A History of Scottish Philosophy (2008), The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation (2001) and (as editor) Studies in Seventeenth-Century Scottish Philosophers and Their Philosophy (2017). Craig Smith is the Adam Smith Senior Lecturer in the Scottish Enlightenment in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Adam Smith's Political Philosophy: The Invisible Hand and Spontaneous Order (2006) and Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society: Moral Science in the Scottish Enlightenment (2018), and he is a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith (2013).