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Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.

Despite the fact that time, evolution, becoming and genealogy are central concepts in Gilles Deleuze's work, there has been no sustained study of his philosophy in relation to the question of history. This book aims to open up Deleuze's relevance to those working in history, the history of ideas, science studies, evolutionary psychology, history of philosophy and interdisciplinary projects inflected by historical problems. The essays in this volume (all by internationally recognised Deleuze scholars) cover all aspects of Deleuze's philosophy and its relation to history, ranging from the application of Deleuze's philosophy to historical method, Deleuze's own use of the history of philosophy, his interpretations of other historical thinkers (such as Hume and Nietzsche), and the complex theories of time and evolution in his work.

This collection brings together eleven essays by international specialists in Romantic and Enlightenment culture and provides a general and a period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. The essays revitalise our reading of Romantic and Enlightenment works in the fields of archaeology, history, drama, literature, art, philosophy, science and medicine, by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the ways in which cognition is distributed across brain, body and world. The volume makes evident the ways in which the particular range of sociocultural and technological contexts that existed during the long eighteenth century periods fostered and reflected particular notions of distributed cognition.

A collection of essays by a leading scholar. The work selected spans several decades, which together with three new unpublished pieces, cumulatively constitute a distinct interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole while incorporating detailed examination of the work of David Hume and Adam Smith. There is, in addition, a substantial introduction which, alongside Berry’s personal intellectual history, provides a commentary on the development of the study of the Scottish Enlightenment from the 1960s. Each of the previously published chapters includes a postscript where Berry comments on subsequent work and his own retrospective assessment. The recurrent themes are the ideas of sociability and socialisation, the Humean science of man and Smith’s analysis of the relation between commerce and morality.

There has never been a full-length history of Scottish Philosophy. Yet Scotland has an immensely rich philosophical tradition that is justly famous for the works of several towering philosophical figures including Duns Scotus, David Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. There are many others who contributed to philosophical debates in their time, whose contribution has not been fully acknowledged. Now, for the first time, a more detailed picture is offered. Throughout this survey, the author shows how a tradition of Scottish philosophical thinking has been deeply interactive with science and the arts, religion and the law in Scotland. The book focuses on a number of philosophers from the later thirteenth to the mid-twentieth century and indicates philosophy's intimate relatation to Scottish culture. It treats the great philosophers – John Duns Scotus, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid – and the lesser-known but still brilliant John Mair, George Lokert, Frederick Ferrier, Andrew Seth, Norman Kemp Smith and John Macmurray.

David Hume (1711–1776) remains one of the most equivocal thinkers in eighteenth-century Europe. Some emphasise his conservatism because of his criticism of rationalism in morals and of the social contract theory in politics, while others deem him one of the most important liberal thinkers. He can also be characterised as a forerunner of utilitarianism or even postmodernism. How can these images be integrated? To address this issue, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment demonstrates the uniqueness and complexity of Hume as an Enlightenment thinker through an investigation of the ‘historical’ Hume. Based on a sceptical adaptation of Epicureanism, he delineates the variable and vulnerable nature of the workings of our imagination and opinions, and emphasises the essential instability of civilisation. In addition, he retains a positive assessment of such modern values as liberty, politeness and refinement, and carries the banner for secularisation. His ‘spirit of scepticism’, which permeates even his non-epistemological writings, enables these seemingly paradoxical positions. This book is not only for Hume specialists, but is also a contribution to the flourishing fields of the Enlightenment study. This intellectual history connects Hume’s early eighteenth-century Continental and British predecessors not only to Hume, but also to British philosophers writing up until the nineteenth century.

David Hume (1711–76) is commonly acknowledged to be the most important philosopher of the English language, and scepticism is commonly understood to be central to Hume’s thought. What, however, counts as scepticism for Hume and how it informs his various works has remained a topic of enduring controversy. Hume’s Scepticism: Pyrrhonian and Academic answers the constellation of interpretive questions around which that controversy has orbited by presenting a comprehensive and detailed investigation of Hume’s scepticism that situates it in the intersecting sceptical traditions from which it sprang. Making a sharp break with dominant contemporary readings, Hume’s Scepticism offers a radical interpretation of Hume as a thoroughgoing sceptic—epistemic, metaphysical, and also doxastic. Hume’s Scepticism advances its arguments for this conclusion in two broad hemispheres. Part One situates Hume’s thought historically in both the Pyrrhonian and the Academic streams of sceptical thought that preceded him. Part Two investigates and interprets the conceptual spaces and logical apparatuses of the complete Humean corpus–including the Treatise, Enquiries, Essays, History, Dialogues, and letters–through the lens of what has come to be called the Pyrrhonian Fourfold. Hume’s Scepticism argues that Hume’s naturalism is a component of his sceptical philosophy and not a refutation of it or therapy for it. Drawing on the probabilistic and doxastic theories of Philonian Academic scepticism, especially in Clitomachus of Carthage, the book shows how Hume developed an utterly non-dogmatic theory of belief. The text delineates the sceptical core of Humes’ political thought and his philosophy of religion; and it explains his sceptical rendering of science and of the external world. Hume’s Scepticism, in other words, advances both historical and logical reasons for the conclusion that Hume is a complete, profound, and coherent sceptic.

‘Radical alterity is not about exotism and exclusion but about imagination of how to weave different worlds in respect of their singularities always in becoming, how to recreate outsideness in our minds.’ This is what Barbara Glowczewski calls ‘indigenising anthropology’ in this collection of essays that chart her intellectual trajectory as an anthropologist involved since 1979 with Warlpiri people from central Australia and other Indigenous people in the Kimberley and on Palm Island. The book shows how the many ways in which Aboriginal men and women actualise virtualities of their Dreaming totemic space-time into collective networks of ritualised places resonate with some of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concepts and also with reticular digital memories. It is a tribute to Indigenous cosmovisions and art, as well as the creative affirmation of collective movements in Oceania, in Brazil and France, who struggle to defend existential territories that could restore a multiplicity of commons to heal the earth from past colonisation and present destruction. Glowczewski draws on 40 years of shared experiences with Indigenous peoples, her own conversations with Guattari, her participation in decolonial ecological debates and engagement for an ‘earth in common’ (https://encommun.eco/), to deliver an innovative agenda for radical anthropology which offers new avenues for research on environmental and social justice based on the value of difference and creative resistance.

This volume is the first systematic investigation into the concept of monstrosity in ancient philosophy and culture. The Author suggests that far from being a peripheral problem, monstrosity is one of the main conceptual challenges for every philosophical system. Ancient authors explores metaphysics, ontology, theology, politics attempting to respond to the threat presented by the radical alterity of monstrous manifestations, both in nature and in thought. Does order come from, and put an end to, chaos or is chaos the monstrous destiny of any supposed order? Is monstrosity a positive sign of the divine or is it its negation and perversion? Does everything, in nature have a meaning and a purpose and, if so, what is the purpose of monsters? Is monstrosity what we call the lowest level of nature's reassuring hierarchy or does it, more threateningly, speak about the absence of such a hierarchy and the illusion of axiology? These are only some of the questions that ancient authors discussed across the centuries, from the early mythical cosmogonies, through the classic and hellenistic period, up to late antiquity and early Christianism. This book offers a fundamental reading not only of the different answers to these questions, but also of the reasons why and the manners in which they have been asked in different cultural and intellectual contexts.

This book rigorously examines the theologico-political works of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, setting his thought against Hegel's and showing how he prepared the way for the post-metaphysical philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig and Jacques Derrida.

Thomas Reid, the father of Common Sense, champions Direct Realism against the Problem of Secondary Qualities. Direct Realism holds immediate objects of perception, like rocks and desks, to be objective and physical. But the Problem of Secondary Qualities argues that some perceptual properties—colours, smells, sounds, tastes, and heat—must be subjective or mental, because science offers no place to them in the physical world. This new reading of Thomas Reid on primary and secondary qualities shows how Reid supports Direct Realism, answers the Problem of Secondary Qualities, and maintains a healthy optimism about science and reason.