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"No distinction of Black or Fair": The Natural History of Race in Adam Ferguson's Lectures on Moral Philosophy
- Journal of the History of Ideas
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 82, Number 2, April 2021
- pp. 207-229
- 10.1353/jhi.2021.0011
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
Recent scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has emphasized the increasing importance, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, of the concept of race. Yet race was a conceptual, moral, and taxonomic puzzle for Scots intellectuals such as Adam Ferguson (1723-1816). While the influence of Ferguson's published works has received wide scholarly attention, the content of his teaching has not. His surviving moral philosophy lecture notes offer us a window into the development of thought on race at the disciplinary intersections of moral philosophy and natural history, and the crossroads of Edinburgh's curricula and Britain's Empire.