Adam Smith and Moral Sentiments

Présentation

Adam Smith’s economics has long commanded popular attention, and references to his legacy as the founding father of modern capitalism have only multiplied in the wake of the recent global financial crisis. But this explosion of popular attention needs to be seen alongside another renaissance of interest in Smith. This other renaissance concerns Adam Smith’s legacy as a philosopher – a legacy that has in fact increasingly occupied scholars of late. It is as a contribution to the study of this side of Smith that the essays collected here are dedicated.
This flourishing of recent revisionist scholarship has had the particularly welcome effect of reestablishing the philosophical import of Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments – a text that has long labored under the shadow of the more famous Wealth of Nations. Yet with this has come a lively debate over how The Theory of Moral Sentiments is itself best regarded. Is its project principally empirical and descriptive – that is, an effort to account for the origin and operations of our moral judgments? Or is it better regarded as a normative work that seeks to defend a particular substantive moral vision? Or, beyond this, did Smith intend in The Theory of Moral Sentiments to invite reflection on foundational questions in epistemology and metaphysics and theology as well as ethics and political philosophy? These and other related questions motivate all six of the papers that follow

L’Auteur

Texts by : M.A. Carrasco, C. Fricke, M.B. Gill, R.P Hanley, E. Schleisser, S. Tegos