The Scottish Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the truly great intellectual and cultural movements of the world. Its achievements in science, philosophy, history, economics, and many other disciplines 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.

Alexander Broadie is a Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow University—a chair once occupied by Adam Smith—and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was appointed the first Henry Duncan Prize lecturer in Scottish Studies at the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1990-1993) and Gifford Lecturer in Natural Theology at Aberdeen University in 1994 before taking up post at Glasgow University in 1995. He was awarded the degree of Doctorat de l'université honoris causa by Blaise Pascal University, Clermont-Ferrand, for his contribution to Franco-Scottish relations in the field of the history of philosophy. Alexander was born in Edinburgh in 1942.