This chapter turns from France to Scotland and from natural philosophy to moral philosophy. Through an examination of a number of leading Scots moral philosophers, we examine the impact of experimental philosophy on the project of the science of man in the Scotland of the eighteenth century. While it is incorrect to speak a movement of experimental moral philosophy in eighteenth-century Scotland, the impact of this new approach to natural philosophy is evident in its critique of speculation and hypotheses, in the roles that moral philosophers accorded to experiment and observation, in the rudimentary philosophy of experiment found in the writings of David Hume, and in the attempts by Scottish moral philosophers, such as George Turnbull, to apply the method of natural history and to incorporate analogues of physical laws in their theories. This chapter provides us with ample evidence for the claim that experimental philosophy had a decisive impact on the development of Scottish moral philosophy of the eighteenth century.

Driven above all by the desire to reconcile aesthetic and moral value, Scottish philosophers, poets and artists made essential contributions to eighteenth-century aesthetics and art theory. This essay examines some of the key moments in the history of Scottish aesthetics from the 1720s to the early years of the nineteenth century. In particular, it surveys the ways in which Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, George Turnbull, Allan Ramsay, Lord Kames, William Duff, Alexander Gerard, Thomas Reid, Archibald Alison and Dugald Stewart debated the respective roles of the senses, reason and the imagination in the appreciation of beauty; asked whether beauty is in the object or the subject; pondered the relationship between virtue, wealth and aesthetic judgement; and considered the existence of a universal standard of taste.