Abstract

Scholars in the history of rhetoric acknowledge eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy as a primary influence on American rhetorical theory, but they usually refer to Scottish philosophy as Scottish Common Sense Realism. This study argues that the moral sense philosophy of Lord Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson was the more widely-accepted theory and that other eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid appropriated in their own work many principles from moral sense theory. This study traces moral sense theory from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson through the philosophies of Hume, Smith, and Reid and the rhetorics of George Campbell and Hugh Blair to the nineteenth-century American rhetorics of Edward T. Channing and David J. Hill. It concludes by showing the remnants of moral sense theory in the contemporary composition texts of Linda Flower and Peter Elbow