Adam Smith as a Scottish Philosopher

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Below is the intro to Gordon Graham’s chapter.

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Was Adam Smith a Scottish philosopher? The question seems an odd one. He was a philosopher and he was Scottish. What more could we need to know, in order to arrive at the simple answer ‘yes.’ And in any case, why does it matter? On reflection, however, neither the question nor the answer seems so simple, and both are more consequential than might be thought at first. Consider the case of David Hume. Hume was Scottish, and Hume was a philosopher, but at one time he was regularly excluded him from the canon of ‘Scottish philosophy.’ The reason is not hard to find. For a century or more Scottish philosophy was especially identified with Thomas Reid, the founding figure of a ‘Scottish School of Common Sense’, a ‘school’ that arose from sustained opposition to Hume. In The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense Selwyn Grave writes:

The philosophy of Common Sense became ‘the Scottish philosophy’ and schooled several generations of Scotsmen. . . . Its history in Scotland began at Aberdeen with Thomas Reid’s teaching at King’s College and his papers to the Aberdeen Philosophical Society. . . The society, important both for the origin and expansion of the philosophy of Common Sense, was formed in 1758 and during its early years gravitated in a distant orbit round Hume. . . . Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, based on his papers to the Aberdeen Philosophical Society was published in 1764. . . . The philosophy of Common Sense arose as an ‘answer’ to Hume (Grave, 1960, pp. 1-4).

Grave is here expressing a view widely held, that the integrity and distinctiveness of ‘Scottish philosophy’ rests upon the exclusion of Hume. Being Scottish and being a philosopher, it seems, can at best be necessary conditions for being a Scottish philosopher. The case of Hume demonstrates that they may not be sufficient.

If Hume is not to be designated a ‘Scottish philosopher’, there are grounds for thinking that Smith is not to be designated in this way either. Smith’s friendship and personal admiration for Hume is well known. His profound intellectual sympathy for Hume is widely regarded as no less notable. Indeed, according to Nicholas Phillipson, Hume’s:

Treatise provided Smith with the foundations on which to base his own philosophical thinking’, Smith’s own contribution being primarily that of ‘developing a science of man on Humean principles’ by formulating ‘remarkable theories of language and property’ into which ‘he was to weave his own conjectural discussion of the assumption on which all Hume’s philosophy was based (Phillipson, 2010, pp. 69-71).

So from the simple facts that Smith was both Scottish and a philosopher, we cannot automatically derive a positive answer to the question with which we began.

The Moviegoer – quotes and extracts – 15

walker percy

Being a creature of habit, as regular as a monk, and taking pleasure in the homeliest repetitions, I listen every night at ten to a program called This I Believe. Monks have their compline, I have This I Believe. On the program hundreds of the highest-minded people in our country, thoughtful and intelligent people, people with mature inquiring minds, state their personal credos. The two or three hundred I have heard so far were without exception admirable people. I doubt if any other country or any other time in history has produced such thoughtful and high-minded people, especially the women. And especially the South. I do believe the South has produced more high-minded women, women of universal sentiments, than any other section of the country except possibly New England in the last century. Of my six living aunts, five are women of the loftiest theosophical panBrahman sentiments. The sixth is still a Presbyterian.

If I had to name a single trait that all these people shared, it is their niceness. Their lives are triumphs of niceness. They like everyone with the warmest and most generous feelings. And as for themselves: it would be impossible for even a dour person not to like them.

Tonight’s subject is a playwright who transmits this very quality of niceness in his plays. He begins:

I believe in people. I believe in tolerance and understanding between people. I believe in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual—

Everyone on This I Believe believes in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual. I have noticed, however, that the believers are far from unique themselves, are in fact alike as peas in a pod.

I believe in music. I believe in a child’s smile. I believe in love. I also believe in hate.

This is true. I have known a couple of these believers, humanists and lady psychologists who come to my aunt’s house. On This I Believe they like everyone. But when it comes down to this or that particular person, I have noticed that they usually hate his guts.

I did not always enjoy This I Believe. While I was living at my aunt’s house, I was overtaken by a fit of perversity. But instead of writing a letter to an editor, as was my custom, I recorded a tape which I submitted to Mr Edward R. Murrow. “Here are the beliefs of John Bickerson Bolling, a moviegoer living in New Orleans,” it began, and ended, “I believe in a good kick in the ass. This—I believe.” I soon regretted it, however, as what my grandfather would have called “a smart-alecky stunt” and I was relieved when the tape was returned. I have listened faithfully to This I Believe ever since.

I believe in freedom, the sacredness of the individual and the brotherhood of man—

concludes the playwright.

I believe in believing. This—I believe.

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In Search Of A Science Of Consciousness

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Alva Noë discusses Evan Thompson’s Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and consciousness in neuroscience, meditation, and philosophy.

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Eat Good, Stay Healthy and Don’t Worry About Being Rich

Louis Armstrong

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H/T to the keeper of the flame Ricky Riccardi

Photo by John Loengard, summer of 1965. Here’s Louis in Ebony’s “The Reluctant Millionaire” profile from 1964:

“Making money ain’t nothing exciting to me. I’ve been making my share of the dough ever since I was a teen-ager playing with Fate Marable on the riverboats. So even if I start making a million bucks a day it won’t make me try to be something different from what I feel in my heart and from what makes me happy in my way.”

“What’s money anyhow? You make it and you might eat a little better than the next cat. You might be able to buy a little better booze than some wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat, and when you die you’re just as graveyard dead as he is. So what’s the difference between me and some cat that’s making it at the Salvation Army Lodge? All I got was a little better roll of the dice.”

“Now you take my wife, Lucille. She’s got everything she thinks she wants. She buys all them clothes from Paris and Rome and places. But them minks she wraps her fine self up in don’t keep her no warmer than some old lady wrapped in gunny sacks and dirty rags.”

“And you take this neighborhood we live in. We’re right out here with the rest of the colored folk and the Puerto Ricans and Italians and the Hebrew cats. We don’t need to move out in the suburbs to some big mansion with lots of servants and yardmen and things. What for? What the hell I care about living in a ‘fashionable’ neighborhood? Ain’t nobody cutting off the lights and gas here ‘cause we didn’t pay the bills. The Frigidaire is full of food, what more do we need?”

The Moviegoer – quotes and extracts – 14

walker percy

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FOR SOME TIME NOW the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.

It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: “In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but—” or “Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However—” and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord. Wednesday as I stood speaking to Eddie Lovell, I felt my eye closing in a broad wink.

After the lunch conference I run into my cousin Nell Lovell on the steps of the library—where I go occasionally to read liberal and conservative periodicals. Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upside-down: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.

Down I plunk myself with a liberal weekly at one of the massive tables, read it from cover to cover, nodding to myself whenever the writer scores a point. Damn right, old son, I say, jerking my chair in approval. Pour it on them. Then up and over to the rack for a conservative monthly and down in a fresh cool chair to join the counter-attack. Oh ho, say I, and hold fast to the chair arm: that one did it: eviscerated! And then out and away into the sunlight, my neck prickling with satisfaction.

Nell Lovell, I was saying, spotted me and over she comes brandishing a book. It seems she has just finished reading a celebrated novel which, I understand, takes a somewhat gloomy and pessimistic view of things. She is angry.

“I don’t feel a bit gloomy!” she cries. “Now that Mark and Lance have grown up and flown the coop, I am having the time of my life. I’m taking philosophy courses in the morning and working nights at Le Petit Theatre. Eddie and I have re-examined our values and found them pretty darn enduring. To our utter amazement we discovered that we both have the same life-goal. Do you know what it is?”

“No.”

“To make a contribution, however small, and leave the world just a little better off.”

“That’s very good,” I say somewhat uneasily and shift about on the library steps. I can talk to Nell as long as I don’t look at her. Looking into her eyes is an embarrassment.

“—we gave the television to the kids and last night we turned on the hi-fi and sat by the fire and read The Prophet aloud. I don’t find life gloomy!” she cries. “To me, books and people and things are endlessly fascinating. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes.” A rumble has commenced in my descending bowel, heralding a tremendous defecation.Nell goes on talking and there is nothing to do but shift around as best one can, take care not to fart, and watch her in a general sort of way: a forty-year-old woman with a good open American face and another forty years left in her; and eager, above all, eager, with that plaintive lost eagerness American college women get at a certain age. I get to thinking about her and old Eddie re-examining their values.

“Yes, true. Values. Very good. And then I can’t help wondering to myself: why does she talk as if she were dead? Another forty years to go and dead, dead, dead.

“How is Kate?” Nell asks.

I jump and think hard, trying to escape death. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know.”

“I am so devoted to her! What a grand person she is.”

“I am too. She is.”

“Come see us, Binx!”

“I will!”

We part laughing and dead.