Recent changes in Enlightenment and Caribbean studies have made it possible to recover a distinctively Caribbean Enlightenment; doing so contributes to our understanding of French and British colonial societies and of the Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan intellectual and cultural movement. As inspired as metropolitan counterparts by ideologies of utility and improvement, colonists engaged in intellectual practices common in the metropole as their lives in profitable slave societies deeply informed their appropriations of Enlightenment ideas. Focusing chiefly on Saint-Domingue and Jamaica from the mid-eighteenth century into the 1790s, this book explores a Caribbean Enlightenment through four topics: natural history and intellectual friendship; the press and the public sphere; histories of the book and reading; and the agricultural Enlightenment. These themes illustrate that becoming “enlightened” made a distinctive colonial identity available to White male colonists, one that rejected metropolitan notions of Caribbean degeneracy and philistinism, redrew the line between free and unfree smudged by proximity and intimacy, and validated on a cultural basis the power to enslave.

In the first of two chapters devoted to the ways in which philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment used ‘conjectural’ or ‘stadial’ history to re-think the development of human society, Aaron Garrett examines the epistemic problems which stimulated their enquiries. Confronting questions in legal history which could not be answered on the principles of positive or natural law, the jurist Lord Kames had recourse first to human nature then to contextual historical developments (such as the rise of commerce) to enable him to bridge gaps in the evidence with empirical and explanatory ‘conjectures’. Kames further drew on Hume’s discussion of time as a psychological experience of a succession of ideas, which carried the implication that the times of history might be experienced in multiple forms. This implication is clarified by a comparison with the strictly chronological conception of time adopted by Adam Anderson in his history of commerce, which fitted every development of note into the same unitary Biblical time scheme. The point of stadial history, by contrast, was to compare societies at different levels, or ‘stages’, of development according to their own time schemes. By pluralising time, the Scots made it possible to envisage multiple histories of human origins, religious belief and social development.

In her chapter, Silvia Sebastiani treats Scottish Enlightenment thinking about the history of society as the product of a dialogue with natural history as well as moral philosophy. The key reference points were Buffon’s Natural History and Rousseau’s Discourse on inequality: from these the Scots derived two rival accounts of how natural man became historical. One conceived of history as the ‘progress of society’ through successive ‘stages’ of development, culminating in the attainment of ‘civilisation’. With contributions from David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, this account was premised on the idea of a uniform human nature, but did not exclude the possibility of hierarchies between humans, and attached lesser value to forms of social organisation preceding civilisation. The alternative, explored at length by Lord Monboddo, a practising judge, took Rousseau’s assertion of the ‘perfectibility’ of man as an invitation to appreciate the variety of ways (physical as well as moral) in which humans might develop, and to accept that quite different outcomes were possible, corruption and decline as much as progress. There was no single Scottish conception of the ‘progress of society’, and the normative implications of stadial history were less uniformly positive than its later admirers have supposed.

Scepticism is the second approach to metaphysics that Kant considered an alternative to his ‘critical’ investigation. It is David Hume who plays the role of the paradigmatic representative of this viewpoint. I begin by analyzing three different readings of Kant’s understanding of Hume’s scepticism about causality. Hume’s scepticism is seen as posing a challenge to natural science and ordinary knowledge, as a problem that puts into question the possibility of general metaphysics, or as a ‘dialectical’ form of scepticism primarily directed against special metaphysics. I suggest that the first reading is implausible. I argue that the second and third readings are compatible once one distinguishes between the perspectives of transcendental philosophy and the critique of pure reason, respectively. Finally, I show that one objection that has been raised against the third reading can be silenced if we interpret Kant’s reading of Hume from the standpoint of his history of pure reason.

This chapter turns from France to Scotland and from natural philosophy to moral philosophy. Through an examination of a number of leading Scots moral philosophers, we examine the impact of experimental philosophy on the project of the science of man in the Scotland of the eighteenth century. While it is incorrect to speak a movement of experimental moral philosophy in eighteenth-century Scotland, the impact of this new approach to natural philosophy is evident in its critique of speculation and hypotheses, in the roles that moral philosophers accorded to experiment and observation, in the rudimentary philosophy of experiment found in the writings of David Hume, and in the attempts by Scottish moral philosophers, such as George Turnbull, to apply the method of natural history and to incorporate analogues of physical laws in their theories. This chapter provides us with ample evidence for the claim that experimental philosophy had a decisive impact on the development of Scottish moral philosophy of the eighteenth century.

“Indulgence: The Stuart Declarations of Indulgence and Their Afterlives,” analyzes the concept and procedure of indulgence during the Restoration and its persistence in the eighteenth century. It argues that the Stuart Declarations of Indulgence as mechanisms of religious liberty were not superseded by toleration; rather, they articulated a formal and affective structure for political and personal relations that persisted as a minor form in the eighteenth century, as exemplified in the writing of David Hume, Edmund Burke, Samuel Richardson, and Olaudah Equiano. While tolerance is a policy and a practice grounded in a theory of formal equality, indulgence persists as a way to imagine relationships with women, with children, and with enslaved and colonized people.

A link is made between epistemology – that is to say, the philosophy of knowledge – and statistics. Hume's criticism of induction is covered, as is Popper's. Various philosophies of statistics are described.

The contributions of Peirce’s scientific work to his philosophy have not heretofore been noticed. His psychological experiments extended the realm of admitted observation: by making putative observations, finding that they agree and that their agreement can be explained by what is putatively observed, what was putative is verified. There is no empirical knowledge without metaphysical but fallible presuppositions; they can only be confirmed by the success of the observations they permit. Peirce expanded empiricism in two directions, both surprising. His astronomical work, ranking stars by order of magnitude, required careful attention to one’s own sensations: interpersonal agreement in that ranking suggested the possibility of phenomenology. And the impressionistic ranking of stars’ magnitudes became the model for Peirce’s idea of normative science. The seemingly oddest of his studies, the ’Great Men Study’, provided evidence that normative impressions, as they agree, are observations. It remained only to make the presumed metaphysics intelligible.

This chapter provides one of the first accounts of Cavendish’s theory of the passions in her later works of natural philosophy, mainly the Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663) and her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668). We argue that reading Cavendish’s philosophy in light of a Stoic-inspired model of causation highlights what is most original and distinctive about her theory of the passions. We analyze Cavendish’s ideas against the backdrop of her theories of occasional and principal causes, and highlight significant differences between Cavendish’s philosophy and the then-popular Cartesian account of the passions. We also examine how her philosophical ideas are put into practice in her dramatic work, “The Unnatural Tragedy” (1662). We maintain that the dramatic genre enables Cavendish to demonstrate how sociable passions might be communicated through sympathy, and unsociable passions discouraged through antipathy. In light of both the theoretical and practical aspects of her philosophy, we conclude that Cavendish stands as a significant innovator among theorists of the passions in the mid-seventeenth century.

The Conclusion traces the afterlife of the knots of memory examined in earlier chapters in two printed genres: the multi-volume histories of the nation that became popular in the late eighteenth century and the historical novel in the hands of Walter Scott. Works such as David Hume’s and Tobias Smollett’s histories replicate some of the counter-memories that were produced in the earlier printed discourse on the nation. Scott, however, transforms the complicated knots of memories and counter-memories by drawing attention to and framing them. Waverley, for example, both acknowledges the power of counter-memories and prevents their re-activation by including them within a narrative that connects a progressive sense of a consolidated British cultural memory with a model of media succession.

Enlightenment thinkers rarely used the word “consumption,” but they spoke incessantly of “luxury,” a multivalent term that became the principal idiom through which writers discussed the moral, social, and political implications of consumption. Controversy over luxury was a proxy for the first modern debate on consumption. The discussion of luxury shifted decisively at the turn of the eighteenth century, when two writers – François Fénelon and Bernard Mandeville – laid the foundations for a vigorous Enlightenment debate. Drawing on ancient and medieval critiques, Fénelon argued that luxury corrupted morals, scrambled the social order, and destroyed states. Mandeville countered by advancing a bold apology for luxury. Far from weakening states, he argued, luxury generated prosperous and powerful nations. Gender would play a key role in the debate that ensued. Whereas critics of luxury like Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned that excessive consumption effeminized men, rendering them unfit for public service, defenders of luxury like David Hume claimed that material well-being was the sign of a civilized society in which men and women frequently interacted. In the second half of the eighteenth century, certain thinkers sought to resolve the debate. Political economists argued that if consumption was directed toward productive ends, wealthy and powerful nations would avoid corruption and endure. Meanwhile, luxury producers incorporated critiques of luxury by designing natural and healthy products. Criticism of luxury did little to slow the pace of consumption.

This chapter explores a variety of philosophical engagements with Cicero in the long eighteenth century, with particular attention to the varied, and at times contradictory, purposes that Cicero might serve. Following an introductory discussion of Cicero and John Locke, the chapter proceeds thematically, turning first to Cicero and eighteenth-century ethics, then to eloquence, civil religion, and law, and finally to Cicero’s status as an exemplar of the active life. In exploring these themes, the chapter deals with the Earl of Shaftesbury Anthony Ashley-Cooper, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, John Adams, James Wilson, and Immanuel Kant.

James Mill’s dogmatic rhetoric in his essay ‘On Government’ (1820) and his rejection in the History of British India (1817) of ocular and narrowly empirical methods, when seen against the febrile political backdrop of the early 1830s, was a gift to utilitarianism’s Whig, Tory, and Romantic opponents. However, his defence in A Fragment on Mackintosh (1835) of Bentham’s jurisprudence and moral philosophy, when placed in the context of his other late writings, suggests a different intention. In both his historical and political writings, James Mill pursued the ‘real business of philosophy’ in which general principles illuminated social phenomena and laid bare the emptiness of Whig empiricism. Only the ‘speculative man’ could appreciate the past’s distinctness by separating general from special causes, and Mill’s indebtedness to Francis Bacon and David Hume is evident in this respect. His attractions to Benthamite utilitarianism and Scottish philosophical history were variously deepened and underpinned by his readings of Bacon and Hume, and those readings, Barrell suggests, may have been encouraged by Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh.

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