This chapter uses the career of Thomas Reid to challenge conceptions of the Scottish Enlightenment that take their lead from Hume’s version of the ‘science of man’. It illustrates the interplay of the human and the natural sciences in Reid’s work and, in so doing, suggests that we put the science back into the Scottish Enlightenment’s ‘science of man’. It traces the origins of what became known as ‘the common sense philosophy’ in Reid’s teaching at Aberdeen in the 1750s and (...) in the discussions of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society from 1758 on. It shows that Euclid, Bacon, and Newton were just as important to the formulation of the common sense approach to the mind and its powers as Cicero and Shaftesbury. (shrink)

SummaryThis article examines the Scottish philosopher James Beattie's controversial work of moral philosophy An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, noted for its pugnacious attack on the sceptical philosophy of David Hume. Usually treated only as an ephemeral success in the early 1770s, the Essay actually had two distinct periods of enormous popularity that account for its contemporary significance in the period between 1770 and 1830. The prominence of the Essay is demonstrated by its widespread positive reception, evinced (...) in both published and private responses, in both England and Scotland, by the high estimation in which it was held within pedagogical circles as an anti-sceptical philosophical primer, and by its continual use as a textbook in both university and dissenting academy logic and moral philosophy classes. In these senses, Beattie's Essay was arguably the most significant work of the Common Sense School of Scottish philosophy. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality is now recognized to have played a fundamental role in the shaping of Scottish Enlightenment political thought. Yet despite some excellent studies of Rousseau's influence on Adam Smith, his impact on Smith's contemporary, Adam Ferguson, has not been examined in detail. This article reassesses Rousseau's legacy in eighteenth-century Scotland by focusing on Ferguson's critique of Rousseau in his Essay on the History of Civil Society, his History of the Progress (...) and Termination of the Roman Republic, and his lectures and published writings in moral philosophy. Ferguson's differences from Rousseau were more pronounced than is sometimes assumed. Not only did Ferguson offer one of the most substantial eighteenth-century refutations of the Genevan's thinking on sociability, nature, art, and culture, he also provided an alternative to the theoretical history of the state set out in the Discourse on Inequality. (shrink)

Arguing that the question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's relationship to the Enlightenment has been eclipsed and seriously distorted by his association with the French Revolution, Graeme Garrard presents the first book-length case that shows Rousseau as the pivotal figure in the emergence of Counter-Enlightenment thought. Viewed in the context in which he actually lived and wrote -- from the middle of the eighteenth century to his death in 1778 -- it is apparent that Rousseau categorically rejected the Enlightenment "republic of letters" (...) in favor of his own "republic of virtue." The philosophes, placing faith in reason and natural human sociability and subjecting religion to systematic criticism and doubt, naively minimized the deep tensions and complexities of collective life and the power disintegrative forces posed to social order. Rousseau believed that the ever precarious social order could only be achieved artificially, by manufacturing "sentiments of sociability", reshaping individuals to identify with common interests instead of their own selfish interests. (shrink)