Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment ed. by Elizabeth Robinson and Chris W. Suprenant (review)

Given Kant's seemingly dismissive attitude toward Scottish philosophers of common sense—in the Prolegomena, he famously describes how painful it is to see them miss Hume's point—one might expect that a book titled Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment would be a rather slim volume. However, as Manfred Kuehn in Scottish Common Sense in Germany and elsewhere has made abundantly clear, Scottish philosophy played a large role in eighteenth-century Germany, and was a significant influence on Kant. The present volume, which stands as a Festschrift for Kuehn, admirably follows on this path, and the nineteen papers collected here trace a number of interesting and surprising ways in which Scottish philosophy connects to Kant. Despite what Kant might have said about the Scots, Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment does an excellent job of demonstrating that there is much to be gained from exploring the relations between the two camps.

The book is edited by Elizabeth Robinson and Chris Suprenant, but the introductory essay is supplied by Kuehn, who provides a broad overview of the ways in which the Scottish influence worked on Kant, and the extent to which this is typically overlooked. The papers that follow touch on a wide range of topics, but they fall into roughly four groups: six pieces on Kant's relation to Hutcheson and Beattie, eight papers comparing Kant and Hume, three papers on Kant and Smith, and two dealing with other topics. The contributors comprise established figures in the field as well as more junior people, and are drawn from scholars of both Kant and Scottish philosophy, so there is a nice mix of views and approaches. As with most anthologies, there is a range in the quality of the contributions, but fortunately all of the papers are worth reading, and reward careful attention. Kant scholars in particular will, I think, find the volume very helpful in expanding our understanding of the roots of the critical philosophy.

There is not space to discuss the papers in any detail, but I will note some of the themes of the anthology. One of the impressive features of the volume is the fresh perspective it offers on Kant's broader thought, especially since many Kant scholars are not fully aware of the role that the Scots played in shaping his views on a variety of subjects. This is particularly the case with the works dealing with Hume, where, instead of rehashing the hidebound debates about the nature of causation, for example, we instead have papers addressing feeling in moral philosophy (by Oliver Sensen), religion and the highest good (Lawrence Pasternack), Hume and Kant on anthropology (Robert Louden), Hume and Kant on marriage (Elizabeth Robinson), the status and role of the imagination in Hume and Kant (Frank Schalow), the nature of antinomical conflict in Hume and Kant (Bryan Hall), Hume and Kant on identity and substance (Mark Pickering), and Kant's response to Hume's thoughts about the social contract (Alexander Schaefer). These are all interesting, but the discussions by Robinson, Sensen, and Schaefer stand out as being particularly insightful and rewarding. The essays discussing Hutcheson's relation to Kant (by Aaron Garrett, Michael Walschots, Wiebke Deimling, Reed Winegar and Colin McQuillian) focus largely on moral feeling, though both Winegar and McQuillian also provide interesting insights into the connections between Hutcheson's and Kant's views on aesthetics, as does Paul Guyer's piece comparing Kant and Beattie. The three papers dealing with Kant and Smith address virtue in economics and politics (J. P. Messina), the phenomenology of moral motivation (John McHugh) and imagination, reason, and personhood (Jack Russell Weinstein). All of these make a strong case for thinking that Smith exercised far more influence over Kant than is typically recognized, and they help make clear why Markus Herz noted that Kant described Smith as his "Liebling"! Given that Smith's influence on Kant is even less appreciated than that...