Gershom Carmichael and the natural jurisprudence tradition in eighteenth-century Scotland

Abstract

No discussion of the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment would be complete without an expression of homage to Gershom Carmichael, the first occupant of the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow and the predecessor of Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith. He has sometimes been called, following Sir William Hamilton, ‘the real founder of the Scottish school of philosophy’, but it is not entirely clear what Sir William Hamilton intended to convey by this pronouncement. His teaching and writings have been characterized more cautiously but perhaps more judiciously by James McCosh as ‘the bond which connects the old philosophy with the new in Scotland’. Clearly Carmichael was a transitional thinker of some importance; but McCosh's description, like Sir William Hamilton's, continues to beg the question: in what respect may Carmichael be considered an innovator in his teaching and in his writing? He was not a philosopher of common and of moral sense like the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson; Carmichael was aware of this development in moral philosophy in the early eighteenth century and he rejected it. He did not claim to be an experimental philosopher or to be the Newton of the moral sciences; this distinction was claimed by and for later thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, more sceptical in their approaches to moral and political philosophy than Carmichael.

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