The Scottish Enlightenment and its mixed bequest

✍ Scribed by Daniel N. Robinson

• Book ID: 102678030
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1986
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 578 KB
• Volume: 22
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/1520-6696(198604)22:2<171::aid-jhbs2300220207>3.0.co;2-9

✦ Synopsis

The Scottish Enlightenment spawned a uniquely psychological philosophy grounded in pre-Darwinian conceptions of natural fitness and post-Newtonian natural laws. Richly anticipating the developments of the nineteenth century, major Scottish philosophical psychologists pressed for an experimental science of the mind stripped of traditional metaphysical suppositions. But in imparting to a new "scientific" psychology just these attributes, the same influential writers underestimated the ontological complexities of the subject and thus the questionable fitness of the Newtonian model in relation to a science of human nature.

In the academic year of 1986, the University of Edinburgh will host an "International Program on the Scottish Enlightenment," dubbed "IPSE '86." Scholars and scientists drawn from a variety of disciplines will address themselves to the special contributions of Scotland during the century and a half beginning about 1720; the century and half in which we find the major works of David Hume,