Preface 1. The case for the Enlightenment 2. Scotland and Naples in 1700 3. The intellectual worlds of Naples and Scotland 1680-c.1725 4. The predicament of 'kingdoms governed as provinces' 5. Vico, after Bayle 6. Hume, after Bayle and Mandeville 7. The advent of Enlightenment: political economy in Naples and Scotland 1730-1760 Conclusion: the Enlightenment vindicated? Bibliography Index.

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The case for the Enlightenment : Scotland and Naples, 1680-1760

'Great gathering of the clans' : Scottish clubs and Scottish identity in Scotland and America, c.1750-1832

Subverting Scotland's past. Scottish Whig historians and the creation of an Anglo-British identity. Book review.

By the end of the twentieth century, the Enlightenment was beleaguered. In the eyes of many philosophers as well as of a wider, educated public this eighteenth-century movement of ideas was still regarded as having laid the intellectual foundations of the modern world. By its confidence in the power of human reason, its commitment to individual freedom of expression against clerical or royal tyranny, and its optimistic assumption that these were the values that would improve the human condition everywhere, it was believed to have inspired and justified the nineteenth- and twentieth-century achievements of industrialisation, liberalism, and democracy. But this lay-philosophical view of the Enlightenment easily acquired another, darker face. For the Enlightenment was also charged with fostering ideals, of rationalism, universalism, and human perfectibility, to which could be traced the modern world's greatest evils. The charge was pressed particularly by those who held the Enlightenment responsible for the violence of the French Revolution, which followed so quickly upon it. In this perspective it was argued that Nazi genocide, Western imperialism, and Soviet communism all had their intellectual origins in the Enlightenment. Not surprisingly, it became increasingly fashionable to conclude that if this was where the Enlightenment had led the modern world, it was time to repudiate it, and to create a postmodern world on new intellectual foundations. The Enlightenment stood condemned as a misguided ‘project’ to establish a single, universal, rational standard of morality.

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The Case for The Enlightenment

This is a study of Dr. William Cullen (1710-1790), the Scottish chemist, physician, and professor of medicine, who played a significant role in the Scottish Enlightenment. I argue that Cullen was both a more unorthodox figure in Scottish medicine than he is generally depicted, as well as a more ambitious one. Despite his controversial doctrines, he skillfully managed the hierarchy of his profession and reached the pinnacle of success as a learned physician in the Scottish Enlightenment. I explore Cullen’s life and thought from different angles. I explicate his pedagogical persona and philosophy of medicine, both of which shaped the experiences of his pupils. I show how his neurophysiology was rooted in his contentious interpretation of the nature of the nervous fluid. And I provide a detailed look at Cullen’s understanding of hygiene, or the art of health—a rarely-studied component of his practice of medicine.  

"Our Master & Father at the Head of Physick": The Learned Medicine of William Cullen

The Scottish Enlightenment was only born as a distinct subject of scholarship between thirty and forty years ago. The exact date of birth is uncertain, because paternity, or at least credit for the name, was promptly disputed by Hugh Trevor-Roper and the late Duncan Forbes. Their dispute was enlivened by obvious differences of style and tone they certainly made the most of it; but its keenness always belied the extent to which the protagonists' conceptions of the new subject were complementary. Forbes developed his account in a series of studies of Hume and Smith, culminating in Hume's Philosophical Politics (1975); but even more important was the Special Subject which he offered in Cambridge in the 1960s. Entitled "Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment" in order to be accepted by a Faculty sceptical of the existence of the Scottish Enlightenment as such, this attracted Quentin Skinner, Nicholas Phillipson, and many others: it was to be seminal not only for the Scottish Enlightenment, but for the whole renaissance of intellectual history in Britain since the 1960s. [1] As the title of the course indicates, Forbes's Scottish Enlightenment was an intellectual movement to which others besides Hume and Smith had made important contributions, and which had concentrated upon the understanding of society and its development; it was also a cosmopolitan movement, whose frame of reference extended well beyond Britain. A similar conception informed Trevor-Roper's interpretative sketch of the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole, in his address to the Enlightenment Conference of 1966 in St Andrews, published in the following year. Stimulated both by the opening-up of eighteenth-century Scotland to new ideas from continental Europe and by their country's experience of unusually rapid economic and social development, Trevor-Roper argued, the Scottish thinkers had made common intellectual cause in exploring what they termed 'the progress of society'. [2]

John Robertson

Papers

The Scottish contribution to the Enlightenment