Author Description

This volume contains a newly-edited cache of over thirty essays on a diverse range of topics from the renowned philosopher, Adam Ferguson, a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. This book aims to set the Essays more fully in the history of western philosophy, to which they made an important contribution. They give an exhaustive picture of the thinking of the author and expound ideas which build on and extend the originality of his earlier work. The need for systematic writing in his earlier, published work inevitably marginalized the topics of interest that Ferguson would resume in the leisure of his retirement, where he was free to rethink and clarify earlier problems. Long-unpublished, his later essays represent a re-appraisal of the philosophical, historical and anthropological themes that he had examined before.