Agreeable Connexions
Agreeable Connexions

Author: Alexander Broadie

Publisher: Birlinn

Published: 2012-11-05

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1907909087

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Scotland has played an immense role in European high culture through the centuries, and among its cultural links none have been greater than those with France. This book shows that the links with France stretch back deep into the Middle Ages, and continue without a break into the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. In one way or another all of the major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment were in close relation to France, and though this book attends to the broad picture of the cultural links binding the two countries, the focus is on certain individuals, especially David Hume, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, and certain of their French counterparts such as Montesquieu, Madame de Condorcet, Victor Cousin and Theodore Jouffroy. Prominent among the areas under discussion are scepticism and common sense, morality and the role of sympathy, and civil society and the question of what constitutes good citizenship. The book should appeal to all with an interest in the broad sweep of Scottish cultural history and more particularly in the country's Age of Enlightenment and its links with France.

Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope
Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope

Author: Ronald C. Arnett

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2022-01-24

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0809338548

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Tenacious hope, the heart of a just and free society During the Enlightenment, Scottish intellectuals and administrators met the demands of profit and progress while shepherding concerns for self and other, individual and community, and family and work. Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope captures the “unity of contraries,” offering the Scottish Enlightenment as an exemplar of tenacious hope countering the excesses of individualism. Ronald C. Arnett reveals two stories: the struggle between optimism and tenacious hope, and optimism’s ultimate triumph in the exclusion of difference and the reification of progress as an ultimate good. In chapters that detail the legacies of Lord Provost George Drummond, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid, George Campbell, Adam Ferguson, and Sir Walter Scott, Arnett highlights the problematic nature of optimism and the ethical agency of tenacious hope. Arnett illustrates the creative union of education and administration, the ability to accept doubt within systems of knowledge and imagination, and an abiding connection to local soil. As principles of progress, free will, and capitalism swept Europe, proponents of optimism envisioned a world of consumerism and absolutes. In contrast, practitioners of tenacious hope embraced uncertainty and compassion as pragmatic necessities. This work continues Arnett’s scholarship, articulating the vital importance of communication ethics. Those seeking to discern and support a temporal sense of the good in this historical moment will find in this timely work the means to pursue, hold, and nourish tenacious hope. This insightful theorization of the Scottish Enlightenment distills the substance of a just and free society for meeting dangerous and uncertain times.

Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I
Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I

Author: Aaron Garrett

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2015-03-05

Total Pages: 515

ISBN-13: 0191043435

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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