-
Adam Smith and VirtueIn Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli & Craig Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, Oxford University Press. 2013.Thanks to several recent studies, we now understand better than ever the place that virtue has in Smith’s larger economic and political system, the sources on which he drew in developing his theory of virtue, and the ways in which his theory of virtue can contribute to illuminating various debates in contemporary ethical theory. In what follows I touch on each of these themes. My principal goal, however, is to provide a reconstruction of the essential elements of Smith’s theory of virtue in a ma…Read more
-
Hume and Smith on Moral PhilosophyIn Paul Russell (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of David Hume, Oxford University Press. 2016.Scholars of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy today tend to agree that Adam Smith, while deeply indebted to Hume, was also engaged in a comprehensive and creative transformation and extension of certain of Hume’s fundamental concepts. But what exactly did Smith take from Hume, and precisely how did he transform these concepts? This chapter traces Smith’s appropriation and transformation along five fronts: sympathy and humanity, justice and utility, judgment and impartiality, virtue and comm…Read more
-
4Adam Smith: From Love to SympathyRevue Internationale de Philosophie 269 (3): 251-273. 2014.Adam Smith has long been regarded as a champion of sympathy. More recently he has also been regarded as a critic of love. But how do these two sides of his thought cohere? This article argues that Smith’s defense of sympathy emerges directly out of and is indeed decisively shaped by his critique of love. Yet seeing this requires reconsidering what Smith understood love to be, as well as what he understood sympathy to be. What follows thus offers a reexamination of Smith’s well-known treatment of…Read more
-
Adam Smith : history and impartialityIn Aaron Garrett & James Anthony Harris (eds.), Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion, Oxford University Press. 2015.
-
6Adam Smith: his life, thought, and legacy (edited book)Princeton University Press. 2016.The essential guide to the life, thought, and legacy of Adam Smith Adam Smith (1723–90) is perhaps best known as one of the first champions of the free market and is widely regarded as the founding father of capitalism. From his ideas about the promise and pitfalls of globalization to his steadfast belief in the preservation of human dignity, his work is as relevant today as it was in the eighteenth century. Here, Ryan Hanley brings together some of the world's finest scholars from across a vari…Read more
-
10Moral and political writingsOxford University Press. 2020.Fénelon may be the most neglected of all the major early modern philosophers. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet today even specialists rarely engage his work directly. This problem is particularly acute in the Anglophone world, for while Fénelon's works have been published in several excellent modern French editions, only the smallest fraction of his vast and influential corpus has appeared in modern English translation. This volu…Read more
-
Justice and politics in the Enquiry concerning the principles of moralsIn Esther Engels Kroeker & Willem Lemmens (eds.), Hume's an Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals : A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
-
Adam Smith's seventeenth-century French theological sourcesIn Jordan J. Ballor & Cornelis van der Kooi (eds.), Theology, morality and Adam Smith, Routledge. 2022.
-
15The Political Philosophy of FénelonOxford University Press. 2020."Fénelon is arguably the most neglected of all the major philosophers of early modernity. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet to now we have lacked a single interpretive monograph in English devoted specifically to his thought. This monograph aims to correct this by providing the first such book-length study. In focusing specifically on Fénelon's political thought, it has three primary aims. The first is to provide a reconstruction of…Read more
-
85. ‘The Happiest and Most Honourable Period of My Life’: Adam Smith’s Service to the University of GlasgowIn R. J. W. Mills & Craig Smith (eds.), The Scottish Enlightenment: Human Nature, Social Theory and Moral Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Christopher J. Berry, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 115-131. 2021.
-
16The human good and the science of manHistory of European Ideas 48 (1): 23-32. 2022.ABSTRACT David Hume and Adam Smith are often regarded as preeminent contributors to the eighteenth-century Scottish ‘science of man.’ For our understanding of Hume’s and Smith’s contributions to this project, scholars today are especially indebted to Nicholas Phillipson, who influentially and persuasively demonstrated how the science of man that they developed sought to account for social progress as the result of man’s natural love of improvement in the face of conditions of indigence and want.…Read more
-
20Reply to my criticsEuropean Journal of Political Theory 20 (3): 599-604. 2021.This reply to my five generous and insightful critics – Gianna Englert, David Williams, Alexandra Oprea, Geneviève Rousslière, and Brandon Turner – focuses on three key issues they raise: the relat...
-
12The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal by Martha C. NussbaumJournal of the History of Philosophy 58 (4): 829-830. 2020.Martha Nussbaum's latest book is a lucid and accessible study of a concept with clear contemporary relevance. In an age of resurgent nationalism, a study of the idea and ideals of cosmopolitanism is remarkably timely. But this is hardly a mere tract for the times; as its acknowledgments note, parts of the book date back to 2000. And ultimately, for all its timeliness, this is a scholarly rather than a popular study of "the long tradition of cosmopolitan political thought" and the ways this tradi…Read more
-
30Rousseau's three revolutionsEuropean Journal of Philosophy 29 (1): 105-119. 2020.European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 105-119, March 2021.
-
19Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better LifePrinceton University Press. 2019.Invaluable wisdom on living a good life from the founder of modern economics Adam Smith is best known today as the founder of modern economics, but he was also an uncommonly brilliant philosopher who was especially interested in the perennial question of how to live a good life. Our Great Purpose is a short and illuminating guide to Smith's incomparable wisdom on how to live well, written by one of today's leading Smith scholars. In this inspiring and entertaining book, Ryan Patrick Hanley descr…Read more
-
15Engaging with Rousseau: reaction and interpretation from the eighteenth century to the present, edited by Avi LifschitzIntellectual History Review 29 (2): 359-361. 2019.
-
17Bringing Religion Back In: Remarks on Gordon Graham for the Journal of Scottish PhilosophyJournal of Scottish Philosophy 17 (1): 6-12. 2019.
-
13Adam SmithIn Aaron Garrett & James Anthony Harris (eds.), Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion, Oxford University Press. 2015.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 …Read more
-
23Practicing ppe: The case of Adam SmithSocial Philosophy and Policy 34 (1): 277-295. 2017.Abstract:Adam Smith has long been celebrated as a polymath, and his wide interests in and contributions to each of the discrete component fields of PPE have long been appreciated. Yet Smith deserves the attention of practitioners of PPE today not simply for his substantive insights, but for the ways in which his inquiries into these different fields were connected. Smith’s inquiry was distinguished by a synthetic approach to knowledge generation, and specifically to generating knowledge with app…Read more
-
64Commerce and CorruptionEuropean Journal of Political Theory 7 (2): 137-158. 2008.Modern commercial society has been criticized for attenuating virtue and inhibiting the ethical self-realization of its participants. But Adam Smith, a founding father of liberal commercial modernity, anticipated precisely this critique and took specific measures to circumvent it. This article presents these measures via an analysis of his response to the critique of liberal commercial modernity set forth by Rousseau. It principally argues that Smith's distinctions of the love of praise from the…Read more
-
37Rethinking Kant’s Debts to RousseauArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 99 (4): 380-404. 2017.Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 4 Seiten: 380-404.
-
13Book Review: Public Passion: Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice (review)Political Theory 40 (4): 527-531. 2012.
-
48Social science and human flourishing: The scottish enlightenment and todayJournal of Scottish Philosophy 7 (1): 29-46. 2009.The Scottish Enlightenment is commonly identified as the birthplace of modern social science. But while Scottish and contemporary social science share a commitment to empiricism, contemporary insistence on the separation of empirical analysis from normative judgment invokes a distinction unintelligible to the Scots. In this respect the methods of modern social science seem an attenuation of those of Scottish social science. A similar attenuation can be found in the modern aspiration to judge the…Read more
-
39Love’s Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in ModernityCambridge University Press. 2017.A number of prominent moral philosophers and political theorists have recently called for a recovery of love. But what do we mean when we speak of love today? Love's Enlightenment examines four key conceptions of other-directedness that transformed the meaning of love and helped to shape the way we understand love today: Hume's theory of humanity, Rousseau's theory of pity, Smith's theory of sympathy, and Kant's theory of love. It argues that these four Enlightenment theories are united by a sha…Read more
-
40Aristotle on the greatness of greatness of soulHistory of Political Thought 23 (1): 1-20. 2002.Magnanimity is often regarded as the heroic virtue of glory-seeking warriors and honour-loving aristocrats. But in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle presents magnanimity as a civic rather than a heroic virtue. By attending to Aristotle's often overlooked accounts of his indifference to honour and his attitudes towards fortune and towards others, I aim to show that so far from seeking only glory or self-sufficiency, the magnanimous man realizes his true greatness and nobility in his beneficence to…Read more
-
Marquette UniversityRegular Faculty
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |