This is the first book to provide comprehensive coverage of the full range of philosophical writing in Britain in the eighteenth century. A team of experts provides new accounts of both major and lesser-known thinkers, and explores the diverse approaches in the period to logic and metaphysics, the passions, morality, criticism, and politics.

• Introduction


• PART 1: THE LANGUAGES OF PHILOSOPHY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN


• 1: TIMOTHY STANTON: Locke and his legacy


• 2: ERIC SCHLIESSER: Newton and Newtonianism in eighteenth-century British thought


• 3: JACQUELINE TAYLOR: The idea of a science of human nature


• 4: PADDY BULLARD: Rhetoric and eloquence: the language of persuasion


• PART 2: LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS


• 5: REBECCA COPENHAVER: Perception and the Language of Nature


• 6: LAURENT JAFFRO: Language and thought


• 7: JOHN P. WRIGHT: The understanding


• 8: AARON GARRETT: Mind and matter


• PART 3: THE PASSIONS


• 9: AMY SCHMITTER: Passions, affections, sentiments: taxonomy and terminology


• 10: TERENCE CUNEO: Reason and the passions


• 11: SEAN GREENBERG: Liberty and necessity


• 12: JAMES A. HARRIS: The government of the passions


• PART 4: MORALS


• 13: CHRISTIAN MAURER: Self-interest and sociability


• 14: P. J. E. KAIL: Moral judgment


• 15: Dario Perinetti: The nature of virtue


• 16: COLIN HEYDT: Practical ethics


• PART 5: CRITICISM


• 17: PAUL GUYER: The pleasures of the imagination and the objects of taste


• 18: TIMOTHY M. COSTELLOE: The faculty of taste


• 19: EVA DADLEZ: The pleasures of tragedy


• 20: PETER KIVY: Genius and the creative imagination


• PART 6: POLITICS


• 21: DARIO CASTIGLIONE: The origin of civil government


• 22: CRAIG SMITH: Forms of government


• 23: NEIL McARTHUR: Reform and revolution


• 24: RICHARD WHATMORE: Luxury, commerce, and the rise of political economy


• PART 7: PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION


• 25: PAUL RUSSELL: Causation, cosmology, and the limits of philosophy: the early eighteenth-century British debate


• 26: ALEXANDER BROADIE: Philosophy, revealed religion, and 'The Enlightenment'


• 27: THOMAS AHNERT: Religion and morality

James A. Harris is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy (OUP, 2005), and of articles on Hume, Hutcheson, Reid, Beattie, Priestley, and a number of themes in eighteenth-century British thought. He has edited texts by Reid, Beattie, Kames, and Abraham Tucker. He is writing an intellectual biography of Hume for Cambridge University Press, and also the eighteenth-century British philosophy volume of the new Oxford History of Philosophy.