The aesthetic of imaginative appropriation, Part 1

When Nick Phillipson died earlier this year he left unfinished a book on the early modern (16th to 18th century) "Science of Man" project.  Phillipson, an Emeritus Professor of History from the University of Edinburgh, enjoyed well deserved success for eminently readable page turner intellectual biographies of David Hume and Adam Smith.  He lived and breathed Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, and generously shared his enthusiasm with colleagues, visiting scholars, research students (postgraduates), and undergraduates alike for 50 years.  When Adam Smith died, he left on the anvil, and gave orders to be burned, his own great attempt at a Science of Man.  I attempt to provide some hints of what Phillipson's unfinished project may have contained.  I have not personally seen his drafts or notes, but did speak with him about the matter on the telephone before he died.

Edinburgh 30 years ago

I first came into contact with Dr. Phillipson in the Winter of 1989/90.  From the start we were an unlikely match.  I had come to Edinburgh Univ. armed with a Postgraduate Studentship from the Univ., as well as with an award from the Chancellors and Vice-Principals of the UK Universities, and had originally selected Dr. Vincent Hope from the Philosophy Department to be my supervisor.  I had chosen Vincent on the strength of a couple of very good essays he had published on Adam Smith.  The one that comes to mind immediately is "Smith's Demi-God", a contribution he had made to a collection of writings on the Scottish Enlightenment.  The essay was about the mechanism that animated Adam Smith's famous "invisible hand", by which economic growth and the creation of national wealth was the product of individual consumers (and other actors such as companies and States--who behaved like individual consumers) making choices for their own private advantage.  Hope's office was in the David Hume Tower and overlooked George Square, where the University Library and the Edinburgh University Press were located.

As I struggled to get stuck in to the Philosophy Department, I realized that not all Edinburgh Univ. philosophers were cut from the same cloth as their Scottish Enlightenment forebears.  Indeed, philosophers like Hope owed more to Wittgenstein and Ryle than Hume and Smith.  Hope went on to publish a book called Virtue by Consensus, which outlined his well considered views of Scottish commonsense philosophy.  The Scots philosophers were neither aprioritists, positing perennial moral axioms or first principles from which they made deductions as they described human conduct; but neither were they true scientists, drawing inferences from observed phenomena.  Instead, they were cataloguers of common sentiments and opinions that bore up to philosophical scrutiny.  So, for Hope and others of his ilk, Scottish philosophy resembled Aristotelianism, an Aristotelianism corrected by Bacon and set on a new foundation by Newton.

It was probably fate that when I produced an essay on a putative trajectory from the Scots to Nietzsche's transvaluattion of all values, that the Locomotive software on my Amstrad computer suggested "nit wit" as a possible correction for Nietzsche.


Vincent gave me the news of just how unphilosophical I was in a dinner that included shallots roasted in their skins and Jerusalem artichokes.  Vincent's wife Annette is famous for writing the cookbook the Londoners' Larder, and is herself interested in poisoning!  Clearly, I survived the Hopes' lovely dinner!  But that was the end of my bid for supervision in the Philosophy Department.

A ripping yarn?

It was at this point that I approached Nick, whose Scottish Enlightenment production I was reading, and asked whether he would supervise me, a colonial who had never so much as taken a single history course, but was nevertheless requesting supervision for a PhD in History.  After setting the usual academic boundaries ("I don't know whether I have the time or the inclination to supervise you, so let's hear what you want to do and we'll take it from there", or words to that effect), Nick was obliging enough, but did make it clear that I would be supplicating for a PhD in History, and that I had better be prepared to tell a ripping yarn with a beginning, a middle, and an end that someone like him would actually be interested in reading, and even in supporting its publication.  He wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to write some "history of political philosophy" thesis that was neither historical, nor political (political theory, after the fashion of the Oxford philosophers, or the Univ. of Chicago Straussians), nor philosophical (examining concepts from the Scottish Enlightenment and claiming to pronounce which of them were philosophically tenable, and potentially true, as if I were some Cartesian technician).  He wanted me to commit to telling a story of how for a specific--and unhomogenous--group of enlightened professors and other untenured thinkers, things got the way they were in several interconnected ways, e.g., (1), as intellectuals, considering their own teachers and influences; (2) as classroom professors with the 14 year old sons of judges and clergy and merchants and mechanics assembled at their feet; (3) as political animals responding to, as well as seeking to change, social and political conditions of their day; (4) as philosophical writers with polemical bones to pick), and so on.

Resistance, rebellion...

If I were able to take a project like that on board, the veteran historian (and friend and follower of Quentin Skinner and Duncan Forbes) told me, he was game.  And so I embarked on the path of writing a thesis on how Thomas Reid--a Presbyterian minister, mathematician, and Adam Smith's successor as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow College--came to develop his lectures on politics, and what made him (Reid) believe that his own teachings could add value to, and potentially compete with, the already very popular strictures on politics by such able hands as David Hume, Adam Smith, Sir James Steuart, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, to name only a few of the alternatives available to real politicians, to practising philosophers, and to students looking for clarity and action in an age of resistance (in the tradition of Hotman, Beza, and Mornay--good Protestants were always interested in limiting the reach of kingly authority), rebellion (after all, the Scots had risen up in 1715 and 1745), and revolution.  Reid himself was teaching in the middle of the American Revolution and toasted the French Revolutionaries as those matters gained upon him (to paraphrase Edmund Burke, who was Chancellor of Glasgow College at the time).

To be continued tomorrow, 10 May 2018