The impact of David Hume’s philosophy on modern philosophy in general and on Scottish philosophy in particular is closely conncected to his scepticism. The paper provides a detailed account of his exposition of the different meanings of scepticism in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, discusses some aspects of Hume’s epistemological scepticism in the Treatise of Human Nature that cannot be found in the Enquiry, reconstructs the basic elements of Thomas Reid s critique of Hume’s scepticism as well as Reid’s concept of common sense, and finally compares the positions of Hume and Reid. Although both Reid and Hume were engaged in what they took to be the ‘anatomy’ or ‘geography’ of the human mind, there were decisive differences between them, in particular concerning their concepts of ‘common sense’.

Religion was a central concern of the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment with David Humes sceptical engagement with religion earning him the reputation of being an infidel. Accordingly, this chapter falls into three parts. The first explores the state of the subject before Hume wrote, distinguishing between an orthodox tradition for which theology was the primary science that could dictate terms of reference to philosophy, and a new, largely imported (English and Dutch), tradition of rational religion that subjected the whole framework of religious belief to the same rational critique as other forms of knowledge and belief. With the context established, the second part of the chapter will concern Hume, represented especially by two essays in his Philosophical Essays (later called An Enquiry) concerning Human Understanding (1748), his Natural History of Religion (1757), and his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (first published in 1779 but known to some in manuscript from the 1750s). His Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) was the seminal work that first presented his sceptical philosophy and its supporting psychology, and it had implications for religious as for any other belief; these implications were suppressed prior to publication, but were not lost on contemporaries who expected an analysis of the human mind to culminate as a matter of course in an account of the foundations of religious belief. The final part of the chapter will summarise the Scottish and English response to Hume in the debate over a rational theology. In his appraisal of arguments for the existence and attributes of God, and arguments about the credibility of ancient revelation, Hume s philosophy almost inevitably brought him into conflict with ministers of the Kirk.

When and how did the Scottish Enlightenment take shape? What were its major influences - Scottish, English, European and other? Can we account for its unique character? Who were its major players? What did they want and achieve? Answers to these basic questions hinge on the debatable nature of the Scottish Enlightenment. Regardless of where one’s emphases fall or the tenor of the Scottish Enlightenment one sees, there is no single context for it. This chapter explores several which were important for all of them.

The Scottish Enlightenment was situated in a particular geography and climate and within distinct population trends. Patrons were important to it. So, too, were institutional contexts and the wider eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. While Edinburgh was at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment, Glasgow and Aberdeen provide other and differing contexts.

We find that the contexts shaping the Scottish Enlightenment differed from those elsewhere. Culturally diverse and eager for improvement from the late seventeenth century, by 1800, the Scots could boast of an Enlightenment to which belonged several of the century’s best philosophers and historians, its most accomplished political economist and many notable social thinkers, scientists and medical men, rhetoricians, theologians and artists. Their works circulated widely, engendering debate and excitement in Britain, on the Continent and in America.

Scottish moral philosophy was two-sided, concerned partly with the human propensity to certain types of behaviour, partly with our ability to appreciate the moral worth of such behaviour in ourselves and in others. The behavioural aspect seen as – and sometimes called – practical ethics, while the concern with moral judgment was considered to be purely metaphysical and part of the theory of the mind. Natural jurisprudence was the central part of practical ethics that dealt with the virtue of justice understood as the sum of our duties and associated rights, and a central task for this intellectual and academic discipline was to explain why some parts of justice were distinguished from the rest of the virtues by being the subject of the institutions of justice, namely adjudication, law and legislation. All the Scottish thinkers saw themselves as Newtonians concerned with the empirical demonstration of the regularities of the physical and the moral realms, most of them (Hutcheson, Turnbull, the Moderates, the Common Sense thinkers) taking these regularities to be evidence of a divinely instituted order and purpose in the world. Hume and Smith took a different view of the metaphysics of moral and hence of moral science and natural jurisprudence.

‘Historiography’ charts the profound influence the historiography of the Scottish Enlightenment has had on the way history has been understood in the Anglosphere. It charts the growth of stadial history, which introduced the codification of progress and development into historical time and now is the dominant mode of history throughout the world. The chapter locates the roots of stadial thinking on Scotland’s political and historical position in the eighteenth century and explains how these have been systematically misrepresented by the historiography designed to address them, leading to fundamental ethnic and political misunderstandings about the nature of the Scottish past.

This chapter offers a new overview of the Scottish Enlightenment political theory, deploying both classic and recent scholarship to delineate its canon, scope, major concerns, inner tensions and European contexts. Emphasis is placed on the major Scottish thinkers David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and others – who developed a profoundly novel vision of political thought itself as a vital political and moral act, and hence of their own historical agency. The chapter juxtaposes Scotland s historical uniqueness, its rich sources of inspiration, and its pioneering vantage points on modern society, economy and human autonomy. It traces the tensions between statehood and citizenship, law and civic alertness, commerce and virtue, unintended consequences and affective human volition. It is argued that, while mostly moderate in political temperament, the Scottish Enlightenment thus helped revolutionize political theory as well as practice.

This chapter reconsiders what liveness means in a musical culture saturated with digital technologies. Where once live performance was understood in simple opposition to recordings, the proliferation of electronic audio technologies throughout the second half of the twentieth century and their deployment in myriad performance settings has made the categorical separation of recording from performance impossible. Digital technologies have become even further intertwined with the creation of performative meaning than their analogue predecessors. After explaining the development of the liveness concept, the author emphasises the increasing variability of its configuration in the digital age, drawing on discourses around virtuality, posthuman subjectivity and intermediality. The chapter concludes with case studies in musical activity in Second Life and in the microtiming-based compositions of Richard Beaudoin, emphasising the extent to which liveness has become for some artists an actual element of aesthetic interrogation, rather than just a way of categorising a musical experience.

This essay explores some fundamental differences in approach to the composition of music for film, TV and video games. Several key technical considerations that influence forms, constructional devices and musical vocabulary available to the games composer are examined.

Whereas the rhetoric of new media at the turn of the millennium stressed the evolution from ‘seeing’ to ‘being’, artists who were most involved in the early stages of virtual reality have moved from the overoptimistic and perhaps almost hubristic notion of ‘being’ as an existential condition of virtual reality, to a far more realistic, humble and ecologically oriented notion of ‘being-in-common’. This contribution looks at two artists in particular – Char Davies and Gary Warner – and the focus of their current work.

Popular cultural commentators tend to demonise digital music technologies, from synthesisers to auto-tune. This essay explores the true causes of the backlash against these technologies as well as the true causes of the current rash of overly ‘cleaned-up’ recordings that threaten to squeeze the life out of music. I argue that it is commodification and fear of the new that are driving the creation of recordings that are ‘too clean, too clear’ and, as a result, lacking in musical expressiveness.

As the world lurches towards technologies of artificial intelligence, algocracy, the Internet of Things, and ensuing privacy paradoxes, music practitioners and consumers have embraced and resisted new ways of listening, while reckoning with emerging sonic regimes. What, however, does technological privilege – and sudden catch-up – mean in a (one hopes) decolonising world still divided on the fault lines of politico-economic advantage, class, race and gender? This article makes several attempts at decentring mainstream views of digital musicking in light of broader themes of recirculations and remediations. It draws from examples around the world, ranging from African-American rap in K-pop, to ‘pathways’ carved by indigenous musicians hidden in plain sight on YouTube, to sonic subversion of internet memes. With an intersectional approach that considers alternative musical dimensions that generate their own logics in interaction with hegemonic powers, this chapter seeks to open windows onto today’s new, asymmetrically digital sonic regimes.

Music plays a significant role in both the establishment of and immersion in virtual worlds. This chapter theorises various forms of musical virtual reality, arguing that the virtual worlds of music challenge existing understandings of virtual reality and immersion. Analysing recording technology, mobile music, video games and the phenomenology of listening, the chapter argues that musical virtual reality can be theorised as an omnipresent, perpetually moving and embodied circulation of musical energy. Musical virtual reality invites a ‘drastic’ musicology that engages with the immediate, immersive and affectively powerful aspects of the listening event.

Music streaming platforms are determinant of the listening experience today. Their ability to profile users and to predict behaviours and tastes is key as their business-models are based on the loyalty of users. Drawing on a study of The Echo Nest, a music recommendation engine acquired by Spotify in 2014, which claimed to combine the analysis of the music signal with monitoring of consumer behaviour via the collection of their data for the first time, this essay interrogates automatic taste-profiling as a transformation of the philosophical concept of taste, opening up new perspectives on music and language.

This personal take describes the motivation, development and eventual commercial release of TouchKeys, an augmented musical keyboard which measures the motion of the player’s fingers on the key surfaces. Digital musical instruments typically lack the mechanical constraints of their acoustic counterparts. Instead, the major obstacle facing novel digital instruments is the time it takes a performer to learn them. TouchKeys preserves the familiar action and layout of the keyboard while adding new techniques such as vibrato and pitch bends, aiming to connect to the expertise of trained keyboardists while providing a gentler learning curve compared to other novel instruments.

Digital media editing techniques have allowed the emergence of common technical approaches regardless of specific media. The non-linear approach to digital editing has encouraged a certain eclecticism in sound and music work to image. The practice of compositing, recombining images from different sources onto the visual frame, is echoed in the layering of audio samples in the soundtrack. This remix approach to audio creativity can be compared to DJ remix practice. Compositing sound to visual sequences is a task of finding meaning in musical building blocks, that can then be freely mixed in sync to picture. The resulting changes in professional practice are shaping a new kind of audio-visual composer: a polymath at ease in music, sound and image.

‘Tape-trading’ – the sharing of illicitly recorded material between hardcore fans – was a small but important part of popular music consumption during the analogue and CD eras. Although the sharing of the same kind of musical material still exists today, the emergence of various networked technologies has fundamentally changed many of the features of tape-trading as a social practice. For example, there has been a great expansion of the amount of material being shared and it is being shared more quickly. However, there has also arguably been a reduction in the circulation of some of the artistically most significant material and some of the strong social ties among collectors have arguably diluted. In a variety of ways, the transformations that have occurred in tape-trading mirror trends within mainstream digital music consumption.

We describe two improvised performances in which a variety of source materials are algorithmically mashed up, using software code that is created on stage before a live audience. Each of us works with an original programming language that we designed and implemented ourselves, with significant influence from the live coding movement. Blackwell’s Palimpsest is an experimental art language, used only in research settings, while Aaron’s Sonic Pi is a free open-source product that has more than a million users worldwide. Working together to transform found and re-purposed material in ways that step outside traditional genres, this creative technical work raises profound questions about the nature of copyright and authorship in the digital era.