An Essay on the History of Civil Society PDF Download

Author: Adam Ferguson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civil society
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Author: Louis S. Reed
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 750

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Author: Lisa Hill
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402038909
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) was a major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment whose thought was, in many respects, original and distinctive. This book is a study of his ideas and of the intellectual forces that shaped them. Though somewhat overlooked in the nineteenth century, Ferguson was rescued from obscurity in the first half of the twentieth century by scholars interested in the origins of sociology and early critiques of modernity. Ferguson’s interest in the mechanics of social life and especially social change led him to many groundbreaking insights. In fact, he is sometimes identified as the 'Father of Modern Sociology'. In addition to exploring whether or not he merits this title, this study examines the whole of Ferguson’s thought as a system and includes his moral and faculty psychology, historiography, theology, politics and social science. Ferguson is distinguished by his deep appreciation of the complexity of the human condition; his study of society is based on the belief that it is not only reason, but the unseen, unplanned, sub-rational and visceral forces that keep the human universe in motion. Ferguson’s appreciation of this fact, and his ability to make social science of it, is his major achievement.

Author: Eugene Heath
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317315375
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Unique among the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson saw two eighteenth-century revolutions, the American and the French. This monograph contains essays that range across all of Ferguson's works to investigate his engagement with contemporary events and his contributions to our understanding of history and human action.

Author: Eugene Heath
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1845404432
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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A philosopher and historian, Adam Ferguson occupies a unique place within eighteenth-century Scottish thought. Distinguished by a moral and historical bent, his work is framed within a teleological outlook that upholds the importance of action and virtue.

Author: Herbert Spencer
Publisher: London, D. Appleton
ISBN:
Category : Sociology
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Author: David Kettler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351534068
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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The thought of Adam Ferguson generated great excitement among many of his philosophic contemporaries in the late eighteenth century, and it continues to inspire the modern reader. This major study by David Kettler is an ideal introduction to Ferguson's life and thought. The new introduction to this first paperback edition discusses Ferguson's work in relation to his better-known contemporaries David Hume and Adam Smith, while the afterword offers an in-depth reconsideration of Ferguson's most renowned work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, with emphasis on present-day disputes about the concept of civil society. Ferguson welcomed the advent of critical and analytical philosophy as an ally against superstitious credulity and confused obscurantism, but he was afraid that it might also dissolve into incomprehensible technical complexity and ethical relativism. He was attracted by the manifest practical accomplishments of modern science, as well as by its masterful ordering of natural phenomena into a unified theoretical structure, but he feared that its adherents would debase the notion of man to that of a machine at the mercy of mechanical forces. Ferguson thought well of ambition, but he also believed that a frenzy of ambition and frustration might tear at man's self-respect and peace of mind. The decisive phenomenon manifested by Ferguson's writing is the emergence of an intellectual's point of view toward the conditions of modern society. Many of the questions that he posed have been restated in more profound ways, some of the questions and most of the answers have been eliminated or transformed beyond recognition; and all of the issues he raises are now expressed by others in harsh, new words. But, however formulated, Ferguson's concerns clearly foreshadow the problems of over-rationalization, dehumanization, atomization, alienation, and bureaucratization that have been repeatedly canvassed by intellectuals in our time.

Author: Lisa Hill
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781402038891
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) was a major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment whose thought was, in many respects, original and distinctive. This book is a study of his ideas and of the intellectual forces that shaped them. Though somewhat overlooked in the nineteenth century, Ferguson was rescued from obscurity in the first half of the twentieth century by scholars interested in the origins of sociology and early critiques of modernity. Ferguson’s interest in the mechanics of social life and especially social change led him to many groundbreaking insights. In fact, he is sometimes identified as the 'Father of Modern Sociology'. In addition to exploring whether or not he merits this title, this study examines the whole of Ferguson’s thought as a system and includes his moral and faculty psychology, historiography, theology, politics and social science. Ferguson is distinguished by his deep appreciation of the complexity of the human condition; his study of society is based on the belief that it is not only reason, but the unseen, unplanned, sub-rational and visceral forces that keep the human universe in motion. Ferguson’s appreciation of this fact, and his ability to make social science of it, is his major achievement.

Author: Scott Ferguson
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496201922
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Critique after modern monetary theory -- Transcending the aesthetic -- Declarations of dependence -- Medium congruentissimum -- Allegories of the aesthetic -- Becoming second nature

Author: Jack A. Hill
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498504582
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
This book is about learning how to live the good life. Part biography and part philosophical inquiry, it is a fresh, original interpretation of the intellectual world of the largely forgotten, eighteenth-century professor, Adam Ferguson. Although less well-known today than his famous Scottish contemporaries, Adam Smith and David Hume, Ferguson was considered their equal in the 18th century. The book shows how Ferguson, who grew up speaking Gaelic and English, and spent a decade ministering to a Highlander regiment, developed a distinctive, cross-cultural approach to moral philosophy that is relevant for doing comparative ethics in today’s global village. The premise is that life in the twenty-first century is plagued by a moral disorientation that has affinities with the materialism, privatization, social fragmentation and spiritual crises that were emerging in 18th-century, urban Scotland. Like his peers in medical science, Ferguson pursued what was then known as moral science with a particular concern to diagnose and treat moral “dis-ease.” The book contends that his moral philosophy lectures became strikingly modern experiments in recovering moral moorings—disclosing epitomes of moral dynamics, investigating the use of moral terms in ordinary language, and crafting moral principles, such as probity, which preserved classical moral virtues but also incorporated the practical wisdom of ‘peoples of the mountains.’ Although focused on re-discovering Ferguson as a full-blown ethicist before his time, the book is also intended as a primer for the reader’s own quest for living a life which is emblematic of ethical integrity The primary audience for this book is philosophers, historians, religious studies scholars who specialize in ethics, eighteenth-century English literature scholars, and social scientists (anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists) who focus on the eighteenth-century.