Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment
- 2 Religion and rational theology
- 3 The human mind and its powers
- 4 Anthropology: the ‘original’ of human nature
- 5 Science in the Scottish Enlightenment
- 6 Scepticism and common sense
- 7 Moral sense and the foundations of morals
- 8 The political theory of the Scottish Enlightenment
- 9 Economic theory
- 10 Natural jurisprudence and the theory of justice
- 11 Legal theory
- 12 Sociality and socialisation
- 13 Historiography
- 14 Art and aesthetic theory
- 15 The impact on Europe
- 16 The impact on America: Scottish philosophy and the American founding
- 17 The nineteenth-century aftermath
- Select bibliography
- Index
15 - The impact on Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment
- 2 Religion and rational theology
- 3 The human mind and its powers
- 4 Anthropology: the ‘original’ of human nature
- 5 Science in the Scottish Enlightenment
- 6 Scepticism and common sense
- 7 Moral sense and the foundations of morals
- 8 The political theory of the Scottish Enlightenment
- 9 Economic theory
- 10 Natural jurisprudence and the theory of justice
- 11 Legal theory
- 12 Sociality and socialisation
- 13 Historiography
- 14 Art and aesthetic theory
- 15 The impact on Europe
- 16 The impact on America: Scottish philosophy and the American founding
- 17 The nineteenth-century aftermath
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
THE BROAD PICTURE
Hippolyte Taine relates the following story: on an autumn morning in 1811, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, newly appointed professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, is strolling along the banks of the Seine, thinking over the content of his teaching. He is dissatisfied with the philosophy of Condillac and his followers, the Idéologues, which seems to him too sceptical and materialistic. He happens to pass a bookshop where a title catches his eye: Recherches sur l'entendement humain d'après les principes du sens commun, par le docteur Thomas Reid (the first translation, published in 1768, of Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense). He opens the book, reads a few pages and his mind is filled with light. Taine concludes: 'He had just bought and founded the new French philosophy.' Among Royer-Collard's first students was Victor Cousin, , dedicatee of Sir William Hamilton’s The Works of Thomas Reid.
This anecdote might be too nice to be true – in fact, Thomas Reid was already known to the French – but we can draw a lesson from it. When we study the impact or influence of one nation upon another, of one philosophical tradition upon another, we cannot ignore the various accidents and circumstances which intervene in the causal connections of a sequence of events. We have to consider the role played by translations (and the ability of the translator), the reception given by philosophical or literary journals, the import of the message in such and such intellectual contexts, the position of people, the pliability of doctrines, the ability of a philosopher to assimilate a new idea or a new way of ideas, and so on.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment , pp. 298 - 315Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
- 1
- Cited by