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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2017
Adam Smith has long been celebrated as a polymath, and his wide interests in and contributions to each of the discrete component fields of PPE have long been appreciated. Yet Smith deserves the attention of practitioners of PPE today not simply for his substantive insights, but for the ways in which his inquiries into these different fields were connected. Smith’s inquiry was distinguished by a synthetic approach to knowledge generation, and specifically to generating knowledge with applications exportable to other fields. Further, Smith’s investigations of various areas of study led him to recognize patterns in and across these fields, and his sensitivity to such patterns helped guide his inquiry and render it a connected enterprise. This paper examines several of Smith’s discrete inquiries in the history of astronomy, language, moral philosophy, and political economy, to show how he employed the techniques of pattern detection that he practiced in each of these inquiries to the task of generating new insights into new fields of inquiry. In so doing, Smith not only distinguished himself as an early practitioner of what we today identify with PPE, but he also provides a useful point of reference for those doing PPE today.
For helpful comments and criticism, I am extremely grateful to an anonymous reviewer and to the other contributors to this volume.
1 For helpful overviews of the ways in which scholars today understand different types of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, see e.g. Klein, Julie Thompson, “A Taxonomy of Interdisciplinarity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, ed. Frodeman, Robert, et al., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 15–30Google Scholar; and Aram, John D., “Concepts of Interdisciplinarity: Configurations of Knowledge and Action,” Human Relations 57 (2004): 379–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 For a recent explicit identification of Smith as a polymath, see e.g. Kim, Kwangsu, “Adam Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’ and View of Science,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 36 (2012): 799.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 References to Smith’s works are to the Glasgow Edition as published in paperback by Liberty Fund. Citations are to the standard paragraph numbering system, and individual titles take the following abbreviations: ED = “Early Draft” of the Wealth of Nations, in LJ; EPS = Essays on Philosophical Subjects; FFL = “Considerations on the First Formation of Languages,” in LRBL; HA = “History of Astronomy”; LJ = Lectures on Jurisprudence; LRBL = Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres; Stewart = “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, L.L.D.,” in EPS; TMS = Theory of Moral Sentiments; WN = Wealth of Nations.
4 For details on Smith’s career at Glasgow, see esp. Scott, W. R., Adam Smith as Student and Professor (Glasgow: Jackson, Son, and Co., 1937), chaps. 6–7Google Scholar; in addition to Ian Ross, The Life of Adam Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chaps. 8–10; and Phillipson, Nicholas, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), chaps. 6 and 8Google Scholar.
5 Smith’s administrative activities at Glasgow during this same period were equally multidisciplinary; see for example the striking list of his book purchases as Quaestor for the University Library (Scott, Smith as Student and Professor, 178–82), as well as his support for the creation of new chemical laboratories at the university (see Phillipson, Adam Smith, 130–31; Scott, Smith as Student and Professor, 147–48).
6 For key recent studies, see e.g. Broadie, Alexander, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Haakonssen, Knud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 158–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Raphael, D. D., The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. 32–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 See e.g., Jonas, Hans, “The Nobility of Sight,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14 (1954): 507CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Eliada, Mircea, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 6Google Scholar.
8 Several scholars have examined the question of the degree of Smith’s commitment to realism or anti-realism in these debates; for a survey and response, see esp. Berry, Christopher, “Smith and Science,” in Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, 121–26Google Scholar. Other recent studies have read Smith through the lenses of both critical realism (e.g., Kim, “Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’ and View of Science,” esp. 813–17) and skeptical realism (e.g., Hanley “Scepticism and Naturalism in Adam Smith,” in The Philosophy of Adam Smith, ed. Vivienne Brown and Samuel Fleischacker [London: Routledge, 2010], esp. 208), and have carefully attended to the precise nature and extent of his skepticism (see esp. Schliesser, Eric, “Wonder in the Face of Scientific Revolutions: Adam Smith on Newton’s ‘Proof’ of Copernicanism,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13 [2005]: 697–732).CrossRefGoogle Scholar But I am less interested here in the question of the nature or degree of Smith’s commitments to realism and/or to skepticism than in the ways in which Smith consistently employed his predilections to system construction and pattern detection across various fields of inquiry.
9 Key studies of Smith’s debts to Hume on this front include Skinner, Andrew S., “Adam Smith: Science and the Role of the Imagination,” in Hume and the Enlightenment, ed. Todd, W. B. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; and Raphael, “The ‘True Old Humean Philosophy’ and Its Influence on Adam Smith,” in David Hume: Bicentenary Papers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977). I have engaged and sought to extend these studies in several places, including “Scepticism and Naturalism in Adam Smith”; and “Smith and Hume on Moral Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook of David Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
10 Helpful studies include Thomson, Herbert F., “Adam Smith’s Philosophy of Science,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 79 (1965): 212–33;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lindgren, J. Ralph, “Adam Smith’s Theory of Inquiry,” Journal of Political Economy 77 (1969): 899ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berry, “Smith and Science”; Schliesser, “Wonder in the Face of Scientific Revolutions,” esp. 699–702; and Craig Smith, “The Essays on Philosophical Subjects,” in Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy, ed. Hanley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 89–104.
11 As quoted in Craig Smith, “Essays on Philosophical Subjects,” 89.
12 In addition to the classic studies cited at note 9 above, see more recently Craig Smith, “Essays on Philosophical Subjects,” 92–95; Kim, “Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’ and View of Science,” 800–802; Charles Griswold, “Imagination: Morals, Science, and Arts,” in Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith; and Berry, “Smith and Science,” 117ff.
13 On this front, see also Thomson’s helpful account of Smith’s criteria for useful analogy: “it must be simple; it must be familiar; and it must be capable of uniting the otherwise disconnected and chaotic phenomena of the field in which it is to be applied” (“Smith’s Philosophy of Science,” 224).
14 Schliesser has noted that “Smith does not provide a compelling account of the imagination’s creativity,” and “hence, Smith’s story can account for the standpoint of only the spectator, but not of the actor: he can only explain theory acceptance but not discovery” (“Wonder in the Face of Revolutions,” 716–17). This seems right, but Smith’s enacting of this creative process in his own right as an inquirer may offer us an example of this process in practice that partly mitigates such shortcomings.
15 Raphael and Macfie, “Introduction,” in TMS, 38–39; Phillipson, Adam Smith, 165–66; and esp. Dascal, Marcelo, “Adam Smith’s Theory of Language,” in Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, 79ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 See esp. Otteson, James, Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 258–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the broader claim that “Smith regarded language as the prototype of the imitative arts and so also of inquiry” more generally, see Lindgren, “Smith’s Theory of Inquiry,” 906.
17 For further details of this process, see esp. Dascal, “Smith’s Theory of Language,” 88–90. Smith also seems to approach the arts in a similar fashion. In this vein see especially Lindgren, who says that what distinguishes and unites Smith’s conceptions of painting and dance and music is that “the parts of the artifact are arranged according to certain rules” (Lindgren, “Smith’s Theory of Inquiry,” 905).
18 See esp. Otteson, Smith’s Marketplace of Life, 285–89. On the role of sympathy and spectatorship in the acceptance of scientific theory specifically, see esp. Schliesser, “Wonder in the Face of Scientific Revolutions,” 710–15.
19 In this context, see also Dascal’s account of the “critical-eclectic non-reductionist alternative” that he finds at work in FFL and elsewhere and which similarly strives for unity without imposing uniformity or denying plurality (“Smith’s Theory of Language,” 108).
20 Raphael and Macfie, “Introduction,” in TMS, 39–40.
21 See e.g. Fleischacker, , A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 49–51 (quote at 51)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 I develop this claim in Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 187–208.
23 I’m grateful for conversations with Samuel Fleischacker for helping me to appreciate this aspect of Smith’s account.
24 For a helpful recent overview, see Nerio Naldi, “Adam Smith on Value and Prices,” in The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, ed. Christopher Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli, and Craig Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 293–98. On the connection with Marx, see esp. Meek, Ronald L., Smith, Marx, and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought (London: Chapman and Hall, 1977), 6–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Spencer J. Pack, “Adam Smith and Marx,” in Oxford Handbook, esp. 527–28.
