This is a study of Hume's political thought based on a survey of all his writings in their original and revised versions, with very full reference to the works of predecessors and contemporaries, including journalists, pamphleteers and historians. Hume's political thinking is presented in its historical context as a modem, 'philosophical', empirically based system of politics for a new post-revolutionary age, and a political education for parochial, backward-looking party men.

This essay, which won the Prince Consort Prize for 1950, treats of the revolutionary change in historical writing that followed the entry into England, early in the nineteenth century, of the ideas of Vico and of the German historical school. Chiefly through Coleridge's influence, eighteenth-century rationalist suppositions gave place in certain men to a fundamentally opposed, 'Romantic' philosophy, and so to a new kind of History. Mr. Forbes is particularly concerned with the part played in this revolution by the (...) liberal Anglicans: Thomas Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby and Regius Professsor of Modern History at Oxford; Richard Whitely, Professor of Political Economy at Oxford and Archbishop of Dublin; Julius Charles Hare, disciple of Coleridge and translator (with Thirlwall) of Niebuhr's History of Rome; Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St David's and author of the History of Greece; Henry Hart Milman, Professor of Poetry and Oxford and Dean of St Paul's; Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, pupil and biographer of Thomas Arnold, and Dean of Westminster. They have elsewhere been studied in the compartments of 'classical' and 'ecclesiastical' history. But it is fundamental to their outlook on Church and State that for them no such compartments existed, and their idea of History as a whole has hitherto lacked an English historian. This essay does much more than clarify technical problems in one of the various ideas of History embraced in Professor Toynbee's system. Mr. Forbes addresses his book to all students of nineteenth-century thought. (shrink)

The term ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ annoys some Scottish historians, because to them it seems to suggest that a state of unenlightenment prevailed in Scotland before the mideighteenth century, but ‘enlightenment’ when used by the historian of ideas is simply a technical term to describe certain aspects of eighteenth-century thought. The trouble is in defining precisely what aspects of eighteenth-century thought it is meant to describe. Different people study the eighteenth century Scottish thinkers for different reasons; for Professor Pocock, for example, they (...) belong to the tradition of ‘civic humanism’ and constitute one of his Machiavellian moments. But they are more widely known nowadays for the modernity and sophistication of their social theory. (shrink)

"Hume's History of Great Britain, published in the middle of the eighteenth century, remained the standard work for well over a century. It is a masterpeice, even if its author is now better known for A treatise on human nature. Grounded on an almost sociological view of the 'progress of society', Hume's is perhaps the most European of all the classic narrative histories of Britain. Moreover it embraces far more than the merely political, and it was Adam Smith who pointed (...) out that Hume was the first historian to deduce political effects from commercial and industrial causes. The volume, covering the years 1603-49, was the first to be written and was published as a self-contained entity. Hume's own view was that it was 'by far the best', because the subject admitted of 'greater nicety of reasoning and more acute distinctions'"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Professor Knox’s translation is, as one would expect, excellent. Even so, understanding this text will present difficulties to anyone who is anything less than expert not only in the philosophy of Hegel, but in those of Kant, Fichte and, especially, Schelling, because Hegel’s philosophy in 1802–3 was still by no means fully-fledged. The result is that the usual difficulties of Hegelian terminology are compounded by the infusion of the terminology and philosophical programme of Schelling; one’s tendency to interpret the text (...) in the light of Hegel’s mature philosophy has to be tempered by the realization that what prima facie looks ‘Hegelian’ is not necessarily so. This makes the initial agonies of a Hegel text even more hellish than usual, and no translator’s notes, no Introduction, however good, can spare one these pains when one starts reading. Perhaps the translator might have been a bit more generous with bracketed or footnoted explanations, for example, of words like ‘divine’, ‘difference’, ‘indifference’, and even more usefully of words that do not look odd in the context, like ‘immediately’ or ‘science’. On the other hand, since in reading a Hegel text for the first time it is usually best to push on regardless, it may be a help not to have too much in the way of explanation of technicalities to hold one up. (shrink)

The ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ has fostered a steadily growing academic industry since Duncan Forbes and Hugh Trevor-Roper put the subject on the map in the 1960s. David Hume and Adam Smith have from the start been widely considered as its leading thinkers, and their thoughts on politics have attracted an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Two new publications invite readers to reflect on the state of the art in Scottish Enlightenment studies in general, and especially Hume and (...) Smith scholarship. Christopher Berry’s Essays on Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment collects many of Berry’s pathbreaking essays from a career spanning over 40 years. The Infidel and the Professor by Dennis Rasmussen is astonishingly the first book-length treatment of the private and philosophical friendship between Hume and Smith. Both publications reflect how much Scottish Enlightenment studies have expanded since the 1960s, and the sustained interest in Hume and Smith to boot. At the same time, they also raise questions about the future of the field and what remains to be done. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Adam Smith’s contribution to the conversation on the nature and value of free government in the eighteenth century. Smith contributes to this conversation in two ways. First, by embedding the idea of free government in a narrative of the progress of government, which traces the interplay between natural progress and social circumstances, and culminates in the establishment of modern free government in Britain. Second, by offering a theory of the form of free government fit for modern commercial (...) states. Drawing on the “rational system of liberty” established in Britain, the Smithian model of free government is based on a “happy mixture” of republicanism and monarchism. Looking beyond the rational system, it merges the traditional concern for constitutional security against arbitrary power with a new science of policy intended to moderate the oppressive inclinations of legislators. The article contests Duncan Forbes’ reading of Smith as questioning the relation between individual liberty and free government, and brings Smith closer to Quentin Skinner’s work on the neo-Roman understanding of liberty. It suggests that Smith’s work may offer insight into some of the ways in which neo-Roman ideas were being creatively reformulated in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Thirty years ago, Duncan Forbes published a short review, which, amongst other things, challenged the view that towards the end of his life David Hume turned Tory. Forbes's subsequent study of Hume's politics showed that, when strictly applied, ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ failed to capture the philosophical import of Hume's writings about politics and even of his semi-detached involvement with the politics of his time. If one took Hume at his own word, “sceptical whiggism”—a kind of moderate and (...) scientific-minded appreciation of the relative superiority of modern commercial polities, and, in Britain, of the Hanoverian régime—was a more appropriate description of what Hume's political writings were about. It also avoided the invidious problem of whether Hume should be regarded as a liberal or a conservative. (shrink)

Hume scholars have been anxious to point out that when Hume calls Justice, chastity and so on artificial virtues, he is in no way denying that they are real virtues. I shall argue that they are mistaken, and that anyone who wants to understand Hume's account of Justice and his category of artificial virtues must take seriously his choice of the word ‘artifice,’ recognizing that it means not only ‘Skill in designing and employing expedients,’ but also ‘address, cunning, trickery.'My suggestion (...) will seem strange given Hume's own repeated plea that we not take the term ‘artifice’ too seriously. Yet while it is generally good policy to take people - at least philosophers - at their word, this is a Justified exception, Justified not only by Hume's known proclivities to irony and subtlety, but also by the implications of hearkening to his plea. To see the implications of not taking the terms ‘artificial’ and ‘artifice’ seriously, one can read either Duncan Forbes’ or Barry Stroud's criticisms of Hume's account of Justice. (shrink)

En el contexto de la reciente explosión de interés investigador sobre la ilustración escocesa, en parte suscitado por los estudios de Duncan Forbes y John G. A. Pocock, la obra política de Hume ha recibido renovada atención. El presente ensayo explora la unidad estructural de la teoría política humeana, tal y como se esboza en principalmente en el libro III del Tratado de la Naturaleza Humana y los Ensayos, así como en su Historia de Inglaterra.

In the midst of a recrudescence of interest in the philosophy of Hegel in the United States and England, this polished translation of Hegel’s introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History is a timely and welcome addition to the English translations of the massive Hegelian corpus. At long last, Johannes Hoffmeister’s superlative edition of this accessible work is available in English twenty years after its publication in Germany. H. B. Nisbet presents Hegel’s lectures in italics and intersperses (...) the reconstructions of students’ notes in Roman type. Including Hegel’s first and second drafts of the first part of the "Introduction," the well-integrated lecture notes, an appendix on "The natural context or the geographical basis of world history," additions from 1826-7, Lasson’s "Notes on the Composition of the Text," and a chronological bibliography of writings dealing with the Lectures, this volume supersedes the previous English translations which were derived from Karl Hegel’s shorter edition. Duncan Forbes’ spritely introduction is a rapid fire counter-attack on a number of Hegel’s critics which charges that Hegel is misunderstood because of an inadequate grasp of the principle of identity in difference and the assumption that, for Hegel, the Absolute "absorbs" the contingencies, contradictions, and tensions in existence. Forbes appropriately stresses the "concrete universal" as the unity of the universal and the particular in history, a unity which preserves the particular as particular, the contingent as contingent. Even though Forbes overreaches himself at times, his defenses of Hegel’s interpretation of meaning in history are provocative and lively. This fine translation of Hoffmeister’s edition of the introduction to the lectures presents Hegel’s vision of history in a lucid, accessible form and captures the nuances of the thought of a philosopher who has been as often misunderstood as maligned.—G.J.S. (shrink)

The purpose of Donald Winch’s "historiographic revision" is to show that most recent interpretations of Smith have distorted his meaning because they have misread the intention of Smith’s work, treating it either as the first great justification of the nascent liberal capitalist polity, or as such a justification infiltrated by intimations of the Marxian notion of alienation. In Winch’s view, either account of Smith’s project is misleading by virtue of imposing nineteenth-century perspectives and categories upon "what is quintessentially a work (...) of the eighteenth century." The problem, then, is to determine the historically appropriate context or problematic within which the complex and at times paradoxical thought of the Wealth of Nations, the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and the Lectures on Jurisprudence can reasonably be situated. As Winch notes, his study is an application of the contextualist methodological principles of Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, and is similar in design to recent works on Locke by John Dunn and on Hume by Duncan Forbes. (shrink)

This paper surveys attempts in the recent literature to offer a modal condition on knowledge as a way of resolving the problem of scepticism. In particular, safety-based and sensitivity-based theories of knowledge are considered in detail, along with the anti-sceptical prospects of an explicitly anti-luck epistemology.

The idea of is explored. It is claimed that there is something epistemically important about acquiring one's knowledge first-hand via active perception rather than second-hand via testimony. Moreover, it is claimed that this kind of active perceptual seeing it for oneself is importantly related to the kind of understanding that is acquired when one possesses a correct and appropriately detailed explanation of how cause and effect are related. In both cases we have a kind of seeing it for oneself which (...) serves what is claimed to be a fundamental good: intellectual autonomy. It is argued that this proposal leads to a distinctive view about the goal of inquiry as often being a certain kind of knowledge rather than knowledge simpliciter. Finally, it is claimed that treating intellectual autonomy as a fundamental good is entirely compatible with granting that there is an important social dimension to our epistemic practices. (shrink)

This paper is about the cluster of issues that orbit a well-known thesis of Quine’s, as it applies to attitude ascriptions.

In a recent article in Analysis, Graeme Hunter and William Seager (1981) attempt to rescue counterpart theory (CT) from some objections of Hazen 1979. They see these objections as arising from ‘uncritical use of the translation scheme originally proposed by Lewis’, and intend to meet them by refraining from use of that scheme. But they do not offer a new scheme; they say ‘…it is no more necessary to have one to capture the sense of modal idiom than it is (...) to capture the sense of quantificational idiom…Appeal to truth value is the single most important criterion of correct translation’ (Hunter and Seager 1981:72). Thus, where the scheme of Lewis (1968) translates a truth by a falsehood or conversely, Hunter and Seager simply produce a sentence which they claim to be a better translation, without articulating any structural principles they employ to arrive at their candidate. A friend of CT should not be happy with this procedure. Let Lm be first-order modal language and Lc be the language of counterpart theory. Sentences of Lc are intended to interpret or elucidate the meanings of Lm-sentences in the strong sense that they should be the outputs of an adequate theory of meaning, which we can formulate as a model theory, for Lm, written in Lc plus set theory. The interest of CT resides in its potential to provide an alternative approach to the model theory of modal logic, and from the clauses of any such alternative model theory we should be able to read off a translation scheme for Lm into Lc, just as we can in the standard case. If CT’s motivation is sound, which Hunter and Seager do not dispute, yet there is no translation scheme and so no counterpart-theoretic model theory, one might suspect some defect in the original language Lm. And in fact, Hunter and Seager find certain Lm-sentences multiply ambiguous with respect to Lc; but if a counterpart-theoretic model theory is possible, to say.. (shrink)

It has become apparent that the debate between scientific realists and constructive empiricists has come to a stalemate. Neither view can reasonably claim to be the most rational philosophy of science, exclusively capable of making sense of all scientific activities. On one prominent analysis of the situation, whether we accept a realist or an anti-realist account of science actually seems to depend on which values we antecedently accept, rather than our commitment to “rationality” per se. Accordingly, several philosophers have attempted (...) to argue in favour of scientific realism or constructive empiricism by showing that one set of values is exclusively best, for anyone and everyone, and that the downstream choice of the philosophy of science which best serves those values is therefore best, for anyone and everyone. These efforts, however, seem to have failed. In response, I suggest that philosophers of science should suspend the effort to determine which philosophy of science is best for everyone, and instead begin investigating which philosophy of science is best for specific people, with specific values, in specific contexts. I illustrate how this might be done by briefly sketching a single case study from the history of science, which seems to show that different philosophies of science are better at motivating different forms of scientific practice. (shrink)

This paper defends Flatland—the view that there exist neither determination nor dependence relations, and that everything is therefore fundamental—from the objection from explanatory inefficacy. According to that objection, Flatland is unattractive because it is unable to explain either the appearance as of there being determination relations, or the appearance as of there being dependence relations. We show how the Flatlander can meet the first challenge by offering four strategies—reducing, eliminating, untangling and omnizing—which, jointly, explain the appearance as of determination relations (...) where no such relations obtain. Since, plausibly, dependence relations just are asymmetric determination relations, we argue that once we come mistakenly to believe that there exist determination relations, the existence of other asymmetries (conceptual and temporal) explains why it appears that there are dependence relations. (shrink)

Mary Astell is a fascinating seventeenth‐century figure whose work admits of many interpretations. One feature of her work that has received little attention is her focus on bad custom. This is surprising; Astell clearly regards bad custom as exerting a kind of epistemic power over agents, particularly women, in a way that limits their intellectual capacities. This article aims to link two contemporary sociopolitical/social‐epistemological projects by showing how a seventeenth‐century thinker anticipated these projects. Astell's account of bad custom shows that (...) she was attuned to the kinds of institutional or structural explanations theorized by Sally Haslanger, and that she acknowledges that bad custom—as an institutional or structural explanation—is intimately linked with epistemic injustice, albeit a kind not yet captured by contemporary social epistemologists. I call this form of epistemic injustice found in Astell epistemic internalization injustice. I argue that the epistemic significance of Astell's notion of bad custom is that it enables us to understand how bad custom conditions human relations in such a way as to result in epistemic injustice. Through coming to understand her notion of bad custom, we can expand our understanding of social epistemic phenomena like epistemic injustice. (shrink)

This article examines the changing scope and method of ecumenical public theology from the World Missionary Conference of 1910 until the present. Most changes were made in response to the changing ideological and political contexts. The collapse of liberalism and the social gospel was followed by a type of confessional ethics which arose directly out of the German Church Struggle. In opposition to this there emerged a realist ecumenical social ethics, much indebted to Reinhold Niebuhr, and of Ronald Preston. This (...) type of public theology and its distinctive ‘middle axiom’ method are examined and contrasted with the more recent public theologies which were influenced by liberation theology and grassroots movements. It is suggested that the ending of the Cold War and the fundamental changes that have taken place since September 11 2001 present a radically new kind of challenge to public theology. (shrink)

The chapter begins by exploring a philosophical case study of the use of intuitions — viz., the debate regarding the problem of radical scepticism, paying particular attention to key figures within this debate such as Barry Stroud, John Austin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It contends that this debate demonstrates something interesting about the nature of intuitions and the role that they can play in philosophical inquiry. In particular, the chapter argues that we need to think of the philosophical use of intuitions (...) as at least sometimes involving a significant level of expertise. The chapter closes by considering the relevance of this point about philosophical intuitions to the negative programme in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

This paper is about two puzzles, or two versions of a single puzzle, which deserve to be called paradoxes, and develops some apparatus in terms of which the apparently conflicting principles which generate the puzzles can be rendered consistent. However, the apparatus itself is somewhat controversial: the puzzles are modal ones, and the resolution to be advocated requires the adoption of a counterpart theoretic semantics of essentially the kind proposed by David Lewis, which in turn requires qualified rejection of certain (...) modal theses about identity which are valid in S5. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.