Recent Engagements with Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans—the social sciences and the humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. We share with the eighteenth-century Scots preoccupations about understanding human beings, human nature, sociability, moral development, our ability to understand nature and its possible creator, and about the possibilities to use our knowledge to improve our surroundings and standard of living. As our disciplines evolve, the studies of Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment evolve with them. Smith and the Scots remain our interlocutors.