Aaron Garrett

This chapter outlines what I refer to as the self-knowledge tradition: that we can attain self-knowledge via our natural reason, that the attainment of self-knowledge is a key goal of philosophy, and that it is desirable and important. Then I focus on an attack on this tradition beginning with Jean Calvin and Conrad Jansenius that questioned the attainment of self-knowledge via natural reason due to the corruptness or inefficacy of our natural reason. This corruption was a consequence of our natural predilection for self-deceit. The chapter considers self-deceit as undermining of self-knowledge in the French Moralists, Thomas Hobbes, and Bernard Mandeville. I conclude with a brief discussion of the consequences of the seventeenth-century and early eighteenth century attack on self-knowledge in a few of the most important philosophers of the eighteenth century: Joseph Butler, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

This chapter provides an overview of the philosophy of Adam Smith by examining the place of history and the role of impartiality in his philosophy. A brief introduction to Smith and his writings is followed by discussions of impartiality and Smith’s engagement with the philosophical role of history and the historian. The section that follows focuses on Smith’s discussion of rights as providing a connection between his moral theory and history via the role of the impartial spectator. The chapter concludes with a brief description of Smith’s history of moral systems. Throughout the chapter tries to show unified philosophical commitments in Smith’s range of writings.

This chapter presents a general account of the speculative and practical moral philosophy of eighteenth-century Scotland. It gives particular attention to three topics: the Scottish insistence that moral philosophy is an empirical, or ‘experimental’, science, grounded in what might now be called a phenomenology of the moral life, and intimately connected with the other elements of the ‘science of man’; the project of combining Hutchesonian moral sense theory with a Butlerian faculty of conscience; and the attempt to combine an empirical and broadly anti-rationalist moral philosophy—a moral philosophy that had a central place for the concept of virtue, with a natural jurisprudence taken from Grotius and, especially, Pufendorf. Particular attention is paid to the practical moral philosophy which was the focus of much of the teaching of moral philosophy in Scotland.

Adam Smith seeks to explain in the Wealth of Nations and Lectures on Jurisprudence the persistence of slavery as an institution. In order to accomplish this, he also draws on arguments he had developed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The result is a sophisticated explanation that bridges economic, psychological, and moral considerations. After presenting Smith’s explanation, I will consider a discussion of the moral wrong of slavery in the work of Ottobah Cugoano, author of the incisive criticism of the slave trade Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery. I will suggest that Cugoano’s account of what is morally wrong in slavery shows an important lacuna in Smith’s views.

This chapter focuses on the ethical theories of the early modern philosophers Thomas Hobbes, Justus Lipsius, Descartes, Spinoza, Benjamin Whichcote, Lord Shaftesbury, and Samuel Clarke. The discussions include aspects of Hobbes' moral philosophy that posed a challenge for many philosophers of the second half of the seventeenth century who were committed to philosophy as a form of self-help; Lipsius and Descartes' appropriation of ancient and Hellenistic moral philosophy in connection with changing ideas about control of the passions and the happiest and best life; and the maxim or epigram – a literary form used by moralists to counsel readers on how to best know and govern themselves.

The publication of 'Animal Rights and Souls in the 18th Century' will be welcomed by everyone interested in the development of the modern animal liberation movement, as well as by those who simply want to savour the work of enlightenment thinkers pushing back the boundaries of both science and ethics. At last these long out-of-print texts are again available to be read and enjoyed - and what texts they are! Gems like Bougeant's witty reductio of the Christian view of animals are included together with path-breaking works of ethics such as Primatt's A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals . There are works I have never seen before, including the remarkable Cry of Nature by the Scottish revolutionary Jacobin, John Oswald. In this set, everyone will find something novel, delightful and truly enlightening. - Peter Singer The discussion of animal rights and the moral status of animals, so prevalent in the late twentieth century, has its roots in the mid to late eighteenth century. Some of the themes we consider of recent invention - the legal standing of animals, the ethical status of vegetarians, cruelty towards animals, ultimately resulting in cruelty to humans - are of long standing. But in the eighteenth-century literature they are interconnected with theological issues surrounding animal souls, the birth of the life sciences, the great chain of being and other peculiarly eighteenth-century problems. This collection explores the exciting early discussions of moral theories concerning animals, placing them within their historical and social context. It reveals that issues such as vivisection, animal souls and vegetarianism were very much live philosophical subjects 200 years ago. The six volumes reprinted here includes complete works and edited extracts from such key eighteenth-century thinkers as Oswald, Primatt, Smellie, Monboddo and Jenyns. Many of the materials are extremely rare and never previously reprinted. The collection, edited with a new introduction and bio-bibliography by Aaron V. Garrett provides valuable original source material to supplement contemporary discussions of animal rights. --18th-century material on the theme of animal rights and practical ethics --an important supplement to contemporary animal rights discussions --provides a broader account of early discussions of the 'science of human nature' through animals --widens our understanding of 18th-century ethics through an important area of practical ethics --includes many scarce texts, most of which have never been reprinted before.

A History of Scottish Philosophy is a series of collaborative studies by expert authors, each volume being devoted to a specific period. Together they provide a comprehensive account of the Scottish philosophical tradition, from the centuries that laid the foundation of the remarkable burst of intellectual fertility known as the Scottish Enlightenment, through the Victorian age and beyond, when it continued to exercise powerful intellectual influence at home and abroad. The books aim to be historically informative, while at the same time serving to renew philosophical interest in the problems with which the Scottish philosophers grappled, and in the solutions they proposed. This new history of Scottish philosophy will include two volumes that focus on the Scottish Enlightenment. In this volume a team of leading experts explore the ideas, intellectual context, and influence of Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Reid, and many other thinkers, frame old issues in fresh ways, and introduce new topics and questions into debates about the philosophy of this remarkable period. The contributors explore the distinctively Scottish context of this philosophical flourishing, and juxtapose the work of canonical philosophers with contemporaries now very seldom read. The outcome is a broadening-out, and a filling-in of the detail, of the picture of the philosophical scene of Scotland in the eighteenth century. General Editor: Gordon Graham, Princeton Theological Seminary.

Adam Smith sought to explain the persistence of slavery as an institution in Wealth of Nations and Lectures on Jurispridence. In order to accomplish this he also drew on arguments he had developed in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. The result was a sophisticated explanation which bridged economic, psychological, and moral considerations. After presenting Smith’s explanation I will consider a discussion of the moral wrong of slavery in Ottobah Cugoano, the author of the incisive criticism of the slave trade Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787). I will suggest that Cugoano’s account of what is morally wrong in slavery shows an important lacuna in Smith‘s views.

A History of Scottish Philosophy is a series of collaborative studies by expert authors, each volume being devoted to a specific period. Together they provide a comprehensive account of the Scottish philosophical tradition, from the centuries that laid the foundation of the remarkable burst of intellectual fertility known as the Scottish Enlightenment, through the Victorian age and beyond, when it continued to exercise powerful intellectual influence at home and abroad. The books aim to be historically informative, while at the same time serving to renew philosophical interest in the problems with which the Scottish philosophers grappled and in the solutions they proposed. This is a companion volume to Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I. Where Volume I covered Scottish Enlightenment contributions to morals, politics, art, and religion, this second volume covers philosophical method, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. It includes a comprehensive account of the teaching of philosophy in Scottish universities in the eighteenth century. Particular attention is given to Scottish achievements in the science of the mind in chapters on perception, the intellectual powers, the active powers, habit and the association of ideas, and language.

This chapter presents a general account of the speculative and practical moral philosophy of eighteenth-century Scotland. It gives particular attention to three topics: the Scottish insistence that moral philosophy is an empirical, or ‘experimental’, science, grounded in what might now be called a phenomenology of the moral life, and intimately connected with the other elements of the ‘science of man’; the project of combining Hutchesonian moral sense theory with a Butlerian faculty of conscience; and the attempt to combine an empirical and broadly anti-rationalist moral philosophy—a moral philosophy that had a central place for the concept of virtue, with a natural jurisprudence taken from Grotius and, especially, Pufendorf. Particular attention is paid to the practical moral philosophy which was the focus of much of the teaching of moral philosophy in Scotland.

A History of Scottish Philosophy is a series of collaborative studies by expert authors, each volume being devoted to a specific period. Together they provide a comprehensive account of the Scottish philosophical tradition, from the centuries that laid the foundation of the remarkable burst of intellectual fertility known as the Scottish Enlightenment, through the Victorian age and beyond, when it continued to exercise powerful intellectual influence at home and abroad. The books aim to be historically informative, while at the same time serving to renew philosophical interest in the problems with which the Scottish philosophers grappled and in the solutions they proposed. This is a companion volume to Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I. Where Volume I covered Scottish Enlightenment contributions to morals, politics, art, and religion, this second volume covers philosophical method, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. It includes a comprehensive account of the teaching of philosophy in Scottish universities in the eighteenth century. Particular attention is given to Scottish achievements in the science of the mind in chapters on perception, the intellectual powers, the active powers, habit and the association of ideas, and language.

In this important new book, Quentin Skinner shows us, with rare precision and eloquence, a world with which we are undoubtedly far less familiar than he, that of humanist rhetoric, and uses his deep knowledge of it to illuminate the recesses of a thinker with whom we feel we are all too familiar. In so doing he opens our eyes to different ways of thinking about early modern political philosophy and provides us with a Hobbes quite different from the one we thought we knew, and the context in which to understand him.

Self-love was a pivotal topic of debate for moral philosophers in the first half of the eighteenth century. But, as was also the case for related concepts like sociability and virtue, philosophers meant many different things by ‘self-love.’ The historians of philosophy who discuss self-love often do as well. A great virtue of Christian Maurer’s Self-Love, Egoism, and the Selfish Hypothesis is to disambiguate five senses of self-love in eighteenth-century discussions. ‘Self-love’ and its synonyms variously refer to egoistic desire, love of praise, self-esteem, amour propre, and self-respect. Maurer uses these ideal types forensically to provide a better understanding of what is being debated by...