By Panumas King
April 14th 2018
This April, the OUP Philosophy team honors Adam Smith (1723-1790) as their Philosopher of the Month. Smith was an eminent Scottish moral philosopher and the founder of modern economics, best-known for his book, The Wealth of Nations (1776) which was highly influential in the development of Western capitalism. In it, he outlined the theory of the division of labour and proposed the theory of laissez-faire. Hence instead of mercantilism, Smith saw that government should not interfere in economic affairs as free trade increased wealth. Smith also wrote the philosophical work The Theory of Moral Sentiment, in which he considered sympathy as the most important moral sentiment – the knowledge that one shares others’ feelings and our ability to understand the situation of the other person – and this fellow feeling we have with others help us to know whether our action or the action of another person is good or bad and conducive towards some good end.
Smith was more of an Epicurean rather than a Stoic. He shared David Hume’s views on morals and economics and inherited from his teacher Francis Hutcheson the spectator theory of virtue, a form of psychological naturalism which views moral good as a particular kind of pleasure, that of a spectator watching virtue at work.
For more on Adam Smith’s life and work, browse our interactive timeline below:...MORE
Who knew?Panumas King is a Marketing Executive for Philosophy at Oxford University Press.
(I mean about the marketing of philosophy)
Previously from the OUP:
"The forgotten history of free trade: the Medici dynasty and Livorno"
Listen Up: Here's Some Marx For You
Oxford University Press: Je Suis Porky
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100 Years Ago Today the War In the Balkans Began
The unknown financial crisis of 1914
"A new benchmark model for estimating expected stock returns"
