Blackwell Reference Online

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David Hume was the outstanding philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, so his place in the Enlightenment tradition might seem to be secure. But things are not so simple. One problem is uncertainty concerning the connection between the Scottish Enlightenment and what is normally designated more simply and authoritatively as the Enlightenment — the Enlightenment of the French philosophes. The latter is commonly recognized as the chief formative influence on the modern world, even to the extent of defining the meaning of modernity as the progressive unfolding of “the Enlightenment project.” The former, in contrast, has often been cast as a mere fringe phenomenon, the appropriate preserve only of dedicated Scotticists, such that to connect it to Hume is to dignify a merely provincial intellectual movement.The Scottish Enlightenment is no longer dismissed, but the long neglect from which it suffered has not been without effect. That it was a major intellectual phenomenon, a significant component of the wider eighteenth-century European Enlightenment -and recognized as such at the time — is no longer seriously doubted. That Hume was its outstanding philosopher is likewise accepted. But that the interpretation of Hume's philosophy suffers when not conducted with an eye to this background is not similarly accepted. The problem does not lie with specialists in Hume's philosophy, most ... log in or subscribe to read full text