Reading the Scottish Enlightenment

Reading the Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: Mark Towsey
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004193510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Drawing on a range of methodologies associated with the history of reading, this book explores the reception of the Scottish Enlightenment, assessing the impact that major texts had on the lives, beliefs and habits of mind of contemporary readers.

Reading the Scottish Enlightenment

Reading the Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: Mark Towsey
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004193510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book

Book Description
Drawing on a range of methodologies associated with the history of reading, this book explores the reception of the Scottish Enlightenment, assessing the impact that major texts had on the lives, beliefs and habits of mind of contemporary readers.

The Scottish Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: Alexander Broadie
Publisher: Birlinn
ISBN: 9781841586403
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the greatest intellectual and cultural movements that the world has ever seen. Its legacy in philosophy, history, science, music, art, architecture, economics, and many other disciplines cannot be overstated. The New Town of Edinburgh would be inconceivable without the doctrines of Enlightenment, equally so would the writings of Karl Marx or the US Constitution. To this day, the doctrines of Enlightenment are still quoted and misquoted. There can be few countries that have produced such a galaxy of talent in so small a compass. David Hume and Adam Smith merely stand as two of the best known.Yet this is the first book for the general reader to consider in its totality the achievement of this most astonishing period of Scottish history, not simply the thoughts, ideas, and people who lived then, but also the creations that were animated by that thought. This is a book not simply about ideas but also about those ideas made flesh and about the new traditions thus created that still animate and inspire the world and the Scotland of today.

The Scottish Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: Alexander Broadie
Publisher: Birlinn
ISBN: 0857904981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the truly great intellectual and cultural movements of the world. Its achievements in science, philosophy, history, economics, and other disciplines also, were immense; and its influence has hardly if at all been dimmed in the intervening two centuries. This book, written for the general reader, considers the achievement of this most astonishing period of Scottish history. It attends not only to the ideas that made the Scottish Enlightenment such a wondrous moment, but also to the people themselves who generated these ideas – men such as David Hume and Adam Smith, who are still read for the sake of the light they shed on contemporary issues.

The Enlightenment and the Book

The Enlightenment and the Book PDF Author: Richard B. Sher
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226752542
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 842

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Book Description
The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits. The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World

How the Scots Invented the Modern World PDF Author: Arthur Herman
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307420957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
An exciting account of the origins of the modern world Who formed the first literate society? Who invented our modern ideas of democracy and free market capitalism? The Scots. As historian and author Arthur Herman reveals, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland made crucial contributions to science, philosophy, literature, education, medicine, commerce, and politics—contributions that have formed and nurtured the modern West ever since. Herman has charted a fascinating journey across the centuries of Scottish history. Here is the untold story of how John Knox and the Church of Scotland laid the foundation for our modern idea of democracy; how the Scottish Enlightenment helped to inspire both the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution; and how thousands of Scottish immigrants left their homes to create the American frontier, the Australian outback, and the British Empire in India and Hong Kong. How the Scots Invented the Modern World reveals how Scottish genius for creating the basic ideas and institutions of modern life stamped the lives of a series of remarkable historical figures, from James Watt and Adam Smith to Andrew Carnegie and Arthur Conan Doyle, and how Scottish heroes continue to inspire our contemporary culture, from William “Braveheart” Wallace to James Bond. And no one who takes this incredible historical trek will ever view the Scots—or the modern West—in the same way again.

The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment

The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: Alexander Broadie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521003230
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment offers a philosophical perspective on an eighteenth-century movement that has been profoundly influential on western culture. A distinguished team of contributors examines the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, Colin Maclaurin and other Scottish thinkers, in fields including philosophy, natural theology, economics, anthropology, natural science and law. In addition, the contributors relate the Scottish Enlightenment to its historical context and assess its impact and legacy in Europe, America and beyond. The result is a comprehensive and accessible volume that illuminates the richness, the intellectual variety and the underlying unity of this important movement. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy, theology, literature and the history of ideas.

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment PDF Author: Iain McDaniel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674075285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Although overshadowed by his contemporaries Adam Smith and David Hume, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson strongly influenced eighteenth-century currents of political thought. A major reassessment of this neglected figure, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future sheds new light on Ferguson as a serious critic, rather than an advocate, of the Enlightenment belief in liberal progress. Unlike the philosophes who looked upon Europe’s growing prosperity and saw confirmation of a utopian future, Ferguson saw something else: a reminder of Rome’s lesson that egalitarian democracy could become a self-undermining path to dictatorship. Ferguson viewed the intrinsic power struggle between civil and military authorities as the central dilemma of modern constitutional governments. He believed that the key to understanding the forces that propel nations toward tyranny lay in analysis of ancient Roman history. It was the alliance between popular and militaristic factions within the Roman republic, Ferguson believed, which ultimately precipitated its downfall. Democratic forces, intended as a means of liberation from tyranny, could all too easily become the engine of political oppression—a fear that proved prescient when the French Revolution spawned the expansionist wars of Napoleon. As Iain McDaniel makes clear, Ferguson’s skepticism about the ability of constitutional states to weather pervasive conditions of warfare and emergency has particular relevance for twenty-first-century geopolitics. This revelatory study will resonate with debates over the troubling tendency of powerful democracies to curtail civil liberties and pursue imperial ambitions.

America's Founding Secret

America's Founding Secret PDF Author: Robert W. Galvin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742522800
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
In this important work, the author illuminates how the founding fathers' motives, thoughts, and actions were framed by the Scottish Enlightenment.

Crowded with Genius

Crowded with Genius PDF Author: James Buchan
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061870609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
In the early eighteenth century, Edinburgh was a filthy backwater town synonymous with poverty and disease. Yet by century's end, it had become the marvel of modern Europe, home to the finest minds of the day and their breathtaking innovations in architecture, politics, science, the arts, and economics—all of which continue to echo loudly today. Adam Smith penned The Wealth of Nations. James Boswell produced The Life of Samuel Johnson. Alongside them, pioneers such as David Hume, Robert Burns, James Hutton, and Sir Walter Scott transformed the way we understand our perceptions and feelings, sickness and health, relations between the sexes, the natural world, and the purpose of existence. In Crowded with Genius, James Buchan beautifully reconstructs the intimate geographic scale and boundless intellectual milieu of Enlightenment Edinburgh. With the scholarship of a historian and the elegance of a novelist, he tells the story of the triumph of this unlikely town and the men whose vision brought it into being.

Seeking Nature's Logic

Seeking Nature's Logic PDF Author: David B. Wilson
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271035250
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
"Studies the path of natural philosophy (i.e., physics) from Isaac Newton through Scotland into the nineteenth-century background to the modern revolution in physics. Examines how the history of science has been influenced by John Robison and other notable intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment"--Provided by publisher.