The Scottish Enlightenment, a remarkable intellectual flourish that lasted for much of the eighteenth century, was an event of great significance for Western culture. During it, scientific, economic, philosophical and other advances were made which had an immediate impact in Europe, America and beyond, and the impact is still felt. The seminal writings of the time are discussed by scholars who return to them in search of insights that can then be put to work in ongoing debates. Hence, though there is an antiquarian interest in the Scottish Enlightenment, interest in it is by no means solely antiquarian, as witness the numerous references we find to Hume, Smith, Reid and other Enlightenment thinkers in present-day discussions of contemporary issues. In this book the historical circumstances of the Scottish Enlightenment will be described; and thereafter attention is focused on the leading ideas, without however losing sight of the fact that the Scottish Enlightenment is a historical event located in a set of historical circumstances that were essential to the movement’s birth and growth. Attention is also focused on the highly social nature of the movement. The writers were held together by bonds of friendship; they argued and debated with each other and created many clubs and societies designed to facilitate discussion. This aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment is a crucial feature of it and will be noted in the following pages. But these historical and social considerations would hold our attention a good deal less if it were not for the brilliant ideas that were the products of all this high-level clubbing. In the end it is because of what they said, not because of whom they talked to, that Hume, Smith, Millar, Black, Hutton and others matter to us, and since the Scottish Enlightenment is essentially about ideas, this book is in large measure an investigation of those ideas.

Sentimentalism in eighteenth-century Scottish literature reflected the ideas of moral philosophers like Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith, who argued that our sense of morality has its origins in feelings aroused by impressions conveyed by the senses. The influence of Smith’s concept of the impartial spectator, an imaginary witness and judge of human interactions, is evident in novels by Henry Mackenzie and Tobias Smollett, whose characters’ emotional responses to scenes of suffering are described in great detail. In theatre, John Homes’ Douglas was deemed a success by the amount of tears shed by the audience, while Joanna Baillie’s plays dramatised moral sentiments by illustrating particular vices and virtues. Macpherson’s Ossianic poems became an international sensation through their nostalgic sentimentalism, which depicted the pure and noble virtues of a bygone era. Sentimentalism in the poetry of Robert Burns celebrates both individual subjectivity and common humanity through his treatment of universal themes like love and nature. Unlike the Romantic movement that would follow it, which tended to privilege individual autonomy and subjectivity over sociability, sentimentalism in Scottish literature depicted individuals as social beings whose sensibility was stimulated and defined by their interactions with others.

What impact did the Scottish Enlightenment have on the American founding? Given the variegated, feisty composition of the Scottish Enlightenment, this chapter resists the idea that that movement had any single, unequivocal effect on America. It instead surveys the rich array of ways in which Scottish thought found its way into America and then examines a series of interactions between particular Scottish thinkers and particular American activists. What was Frances Hutcheson’s influence on Thomas Jefferson? Did David Hume or Adam Smith have a greater influence on Madison? What lessons did various American educational leaders take away from Thomas Reid’s response to David Hume? By looking in detail at these three cases, the chapter attempts to convey the flavour, as well as the content, of the reception of Scottish philosophy in America.

From the premise that humans are social beings, the Scots develop negative and positive arguments. Negatively, they reject all contractarian/rationalistic accounts of social living and downplay any crucial role for ‘Great Men’. Positively, they emphasise the effects of socialisation and underline the factors underpinning social coherence (here called institutional stickiness). Customary ways of behaving, and the institutions thus constituted, not only stabilise but also constrain, and since habits are creatures of time, then it is gradual alterations in the sentiments of people that changes them. In contrast to any glib confidence in ‘progress’, the Scots are more cautious. They do believe in improvement, but it is not guaranteed and is a gradual process.

Adam Smith has acquired the reputation as the father of economics, but he was not alone among the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in his interest in the emerging discipline of political economy. This chapter examines the broader context of the political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment and relates it to the general move from the mercantile attitudes behind the great disaster of the Darien project to the critique of them developed by Smith in the Wealth of Nations. The economic thinking of David Hume and Sir James Steuart and others is examined in order to illustrate the breadth of the Scottish contribution to the development of thinking about the economy.

This chapter argues for the centrality of the natural sciences in the Scottish Enlightenment. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, the activities of mathematical practitioners such as George Sinclair and virtuosi such as Sir Robert Sibbald laid the institutional foundations for the cultivation of natural knowledge in the Enlightenment era and incorporated the sciences of nature into Scotland s emerging public sphere. The restructuring of the Scottish universities in the decades following the Glorious Revolution enhanced the facilities for teaching and research in the sciences and, in doing so, fostered the rise of Newtonianism in Scotland. Newton’s writings inspired innovative work by Colin Maclaurin and other Scottish Newtonians across the many branches of mathematics and natural philosophy and also shaped the methods employed in the nascent ‘science of man’. The compatibility of the Newtonian system with religious belief, in turn, served to solidify the place of natural knowledge in Enlightenment culture, as did the harnessing of such knowledge to economic improvement. Even though the debate over James Hutton s theory of the earth in the 1790s challenged the alliance between science and religion, the natural sciences had by then established themselves as integral and vital components of the Scottish Enlightenment.

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.