Abstract

Ten of the twelve essays in this fine collection treat subjects that are relevant to any reasonably comprehensive understanding of the nature of the history of science. The first four essays are either completely or largely historiographical. Each explores the extent to which the natural sciences have been, or should be, seen as central to the Scottish Enlightenment. As all four provide extended descriptive historiographies, there is extensive repetition here, but as the four also offer radically different answers, they are worth reading.In the first essay Paul Wood argues that Dugald Stewart created an imaginary picture of the Scottish Enlightenment that has influenced almost all subsequent interpretations of the movement. These interpretations have promoted the idea that there was a coherent “Scottish school” of philosophy of which David Hume and Francis Hutcheson were the cofounders; that the Scottish school emphasized moral philosophy and social theory; and that it included figures from Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen. Wood claims that Stewart downplayed the relationship between natural knowledge and social theory, except for some minor methodological commonalities, for several reasons. In part, he desperately wanted to maintain the mind‐body dualism that characterized the Scottish school. In addition, his main statement on the Scottish Enlightenment appeared as an essay on the history of the progress of metaphysics and morals that was paired with John Leslie's essay on the progress of the natural sciences in the supplement to the fourth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and he was simply responding to the limits of his assignment. Regardless of his motives, one major consequence of Stewart's approach has been the exclusion of the natural sciences from a central role in most subsequent interpretations of the Scottish Enlightenment not written by historians of science—an exclusion Wood laments.The second essay, by John Robertson, seems, on one level, almost designed to prove Wood's main point, for it explicitly denies natural science a significant role. For Robertson, moral philosophy, history, and, above all, political economy are at the core of Scottish concerns. He departs from Stewart, however, by insisting on a fundamental opposition between Hume and Hutcheson and by arguing that the Scottish Enlightenment would be better understood as part of a broader European Enlightenment, with less patriotic fervor about Scots exceptionalism.Richard Sher's essay on what book history can tell us about science and medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment is remarkably insightful and illuminating; it left me waiting with great anticipation for his book‐length study on the subject. Although Sher rejects Roger Emerson's claims that the natural sciences were the driving force for the Enlightenment in Scotland, he insists that science and medicine were important. He then goes on to suggest a series of fascinating ways in which characteristics of the book trade both shaped and can illuminate the place of science.Among the other essays likely to interest historians of science are those by Anita Guerrini, John Wright, and Fiona MacDonald. These authors explore aspects of medical theory and medical care in very different but very illuminating ways. One other related set of essays consists of pieces by James Moore, Christopher Berry, and Alexander Broadie, all of which focus on aspects of the theorized relationship between science and religion. Here, the major theme is the difference in emphases between those who followed the ancient materialists in seeing fear as the primary motive in the origins of religion and those who emphasized some version of the design argument.This volume provides a good introduction to the current state of interpretations of the Scottish Enlightenment, and its special emphasis on the place of science among eighteenth‐century Scottish intellectuals should make it attractive to many readers of Isis