Adam Smith’s formal legacy to posterity consisted of meticulously revised editions of his two published works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations; long-standing plans for treatises on Jurisprudence, Rhetoric, and the Fine Arts were abandoned on the grounds that there was no time to complete them. This chapter discusses Smith oeuvre as component parts of an unrealized plan to develop a Science of Man on experimental principles. Smith’s introduction to this grand projet as a student is (...) explored and the influence of Hutcheson and Hume is emphasized as is the fact that Smith developed both the published and unpublished components of his Science of Man simultaneously. The question of the meaning Smith attached to ‘science’ is a continuing theme of the chapter. (shrink)

In this paper I want to discuss David Hume's views about morals, politics and citizenship and the role of philosophers and philosophizing in modern civil society - what I shall call his theory of civic morality. This is a subject which has been neglected by philosophers, presumably because it is of limited philosophical interest. But it is of considerable interest to the historian who wants to understand Hume's development as a philosopher, to locate his thought within a specific, Scottish context (...) and to arrive at some understanding of his surprisingly close and cordial relations with the literary and social world of enlightened Edinburgh. These are large claims and I cannot hope to substantiate them fully in a short paper. My purpose is first, to show that, historically speaking, Hume's preoccupation with civic morality was of central rather than peripheral interest to him as a philosopher and that it helps to explain his otherwise rather puzzling decision to give up philosophizing systematically in the manner of Hobbes and Locke, in favour of polite essay-writing in the manner of Addison and Steele. My second purpose is to suggest that Hume's interest in civic morality, his neo-Addisonian mode of philosophizing about it and the nature of his understanding of politics, citizenship and philosophizing in a modern age was, unlike his thought about religion, responsive to and consonant with some of the most important ideological preoccupations of his Scottish contemporaries. It was, I suspect, a shared interest which helped to contain some of the anxieties Hume's notorious religious scepticism caused his contemporaries. Without it, he could not possibly have emerged as one of the leaders of Edinburgh's intellectual life in the age of the Scottish Enlightenment. (shrink)

Inspired by the work of intellectual historian J. G. A. Pocock, this 1993 collection explores the political ideologies of early modern Britain.

A giant of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, David Hume was one of the most important philosophers ever to write in English. He was also a brilliant historian. In this book—a new and revised edition of his 1989 classic—Nicholas Phillipson shows how Hume freed history from religion and politics. As a philosopher, Hume sought a way of seeing the world and pursuing happiness independently of a belief in God. His groundbreaking approach applied the same outlook to Britain's history, showing how the past (...) was shaped solely through human choices and actions. In this analysis of Hume's life and works, from his university days in Edinburgh to the rapturous reception of his _History of England_, Nicholas Phillipson reveals the gradual process by which one of the greatest Western philosophers turned himself into one of the greatest historians of Britain. In doing so, he shows us how revolutionary Hume was, and why his ideas still matter today. (shrink)