R J W Mills
Biographic Data
| ID | 461799 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R J W Mills |
| GIVEN NAMES | R J W |
| FAMILY NAME | Mills |
| SIGNATURE | MILLS R J W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen Mary University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4257-0944 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 48 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Aileen Fyfe and Colin Kidd, Beyond the Enlightenment
Misunderstanding Monboddo on ‘Race’, Slavery and the Black Egyptian Origins of All Civilization
James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s (1714–1799) contribution to Scottish Enlightenment thinking on race is regularly held to be twofold. As a Lord of Session, he supposedly defended slavery on Aristotelian grounds, infamously voting against Joseph Knight’s freedom in Knight v. Wedderburn (1778). In his philosophical writings, Monboddo is known for his arguments in favour of the humanity of orangutangs, which scholars have claimed informed both his own…
The Rebirth of Revelation
Perman, James Hutton
Red list
Religion and the Start of the Science of Human Nature
David Hume and the Emptiness of Natural Religion
Conclusion
Adam Smith on Religious Psychology in Society
Adam Ferguson, Stoicism and the Individual Alone
Dugald Stewart, Religion and the End of the “Science of Human Nature”
William Robertson on Revelation and the Limits of Progress
James Burnett, Lord Monboddo on Egyptian Daemons
John Gregory on Human Nature, Happiness and Religious Devotion
The Radicalism of James Hutton
Henry Home, Lord Kames on Mechanistic Human Nature
George Campbell on Miracles and the Weakness of Hume’s “Science of Man”
David Hume’s “Natural History of Religion” (1757)
James Dunbar on Climate and Civil Religion
Religion and the Science of Human Nature in the Scottish Enlightenment
This book explores in depth how enlightened Scottish social theorists c.1740 to c.1790 explored the topic of the origin and development of religion.
David Hume and the myth of the ‘Warburtonian School’
David Hume (1711–1776) believed a ‘confederacy of authors’, brought together by the notoriously pugnacious William Warburton (1698–1779), were his most consistent and scurrilous critics. Warburton and his ‘School’ were Hume’s bêtes noires and embodied so much of what he fought against. Only there is reason to believe that the ‘Warburtonian School’ was more a useful fiction than a historical reality. The following deep dive into Humeana and the ‘s…
Beyond anglicised politeness
Joseph Addison played a key role in Nicholas Phillipson's pioneering studies of eighteenth-century Scottish culture and philosophy. Post-Union Scots were in search of renewed civic purpose now political power had headed to Westminster. They found it in Addison's Spectator essays discussing virtuous living. This article pays homage to Phillipson's work by expanding the scope of the study of Addison's reception in eighteenth-century Scotland. A sur…
Introduction
No abstract available.
The ‘Almost Wilfully Perverse’ Lord Monboddo and the Scottish Enlightenment’s Science of Human Nature
Egyptomania and religion in James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s ‘History of Man’
The Scottish judge and ‘eccentric’ philosopher James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s (1714–1799) significance within Enlightenment thought is usually seen as stemming from his Origin and Progress of Language (6 vols., 1773–1792). The OPL was a major contribution to the Enlightenment’s debate over the philosophy of language, and established Monboddo’s reputation as an innovative and influential, yet controversial and credulous proto-anthropologist. In th…
Lord Kames's analysis of the natural origins of religion
This article investigates the discussion of the origins and development of religious belief within the Scottish jurist and philosopher Henry Home, Lord Kames's Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751). Kames's work is argued to be a significant yet understudied contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment's examination of religion as a human phenomenon. The Principles contained one of the lengthiest analyses on the topic pub…
Red list
David Hume and the myth of the ‘Warburtonian School’
David Hume (1711–1776) believed a ‘confederacy of authors’, brought together by the notoriously pugnacious William Warburton (1698–1779), were his most consistent and scurrilous critics. Warburton and his ‘School’ were Hume’s bêtes noires and embodied so much of what he fought against. Only there is reason to believe that the ‘Warburtonian School’ was more a useful fiction than a historical reality. The following deep dive into Humeana and the ‘s…
Egyptomania and religion in James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s ‘History of Man’
The Scottish judge and ‘eccentric’ philosopher James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s (1714–1799) significance within Enlightenment thought is usually seen as stemming from his Origin and Progress of Language (6 vols., 1773–1792). The OPL was a major contribution to the Enlightenment’s debate over the philosophy of language, and established Monboddo’s reputation as an innovative and influential, yet controversial and credulous proto-anthropologist. In th…
The “historical question” at the end of the Scottish Enlightenment
This study examines the leading early nineteenth-century Scottish moral philosopher Dugald Stewart’s discussion of the origin and development of religion. Stewart developed his account in his final work, The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man (1828), in an effort to show that the fact that polytheism was the first religion of humankind does not undermine the truth of monotheism. He wrote in response to similar discussions presented …
Alexander Ross’s Pansebeia (1653), religious compendia and the seventeenth-century study of religious diversity
Recently, our scholarly understanding of how religion was studied during the seventeenth century has changed. Contributions made by historians of scholarship have provided a more detailed picture through studies of the emerging genre of the history of idolatry. This article, however, looks at another new but overlooked genre in the seventeenth century: the religious catalogue. It does so through an examination of the most popular compendium of th…
The Reception of ‘That Bigoted Silly Fellow’ James Beattie's Essay on Truth in Britain 1770–1830
This article examines the Scottish philosopher James Beattie's (1735–1803) controversial work of moral philosophy An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770), noted for its pugnacious attack on the sceptical philosophy of David Hume. Usually treated only as an ephemeral success in the early 1770s, the Essay actually had two distinct periods of enormous popularity that account for its contemporary significance in the period between 177…
Archibald Campbell's Necessity of Revelation (1739)—the Science of Human Nature's First Study of Religion
This article argues that Archibald Campbell's Necessity of Revelation (1739) can be viewed as the first application of the ‘science of human nature’, a characteristic branch of the Scottish Enlightenment, to the study of religious belief. Adopting Baconian and Newtonian methodological principles, Campbell set hypotheses, collected historical data, and inferred conclusions about the capabilities of human nature to come to fundamental religious ide…
The Reception of ‘That Bigoted Silly Fellow’ James Beattie's Essay on Truth in Britain 1770–1830
This article examines the Scottish philosopher James Beattie's (1735–1803) controversial work of moral philosophy An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770), noted for its pugnacious attack on the sceptical philosophy of David Hume. Usually treated only as an ephemeral success in the early 1770s, the Essay actually had two distinct periods of enormous popularity that account for its contemporary significance in the period between 177…
The Catholic Enlightenment. The forgotten history of a global movement
Alexander Ross’s Pansebeia (1653), religious compendia and the seventeenth-century study of religious diversity
Recently, our scholarly understanding of how religion was studied during the seventeenth century has changed. Contributions made by historians of scholarship have provided a more detailed picture through studies of the emerging genre of the history of idolatry. This article, however, looks at another new but overlooked genre in the seventeenth century: the religious catalogue. It does so through an examination of the most popular compendium of th…
Zaretsky, Boswell's Enlightenment Bonnyman, The Third Duke of Buccleuch and Adam Smith
Lord Kames's analysis of the natural origins of religion
This article investigates the discussion of the origins and development of religious belief within the Scottish jurist and philosopher Henry Home, Lord Kames's Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751). Kames's work is argued to be a significant yet understudied contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment's examination of religion as a human phenomenon. The Principles contained one of the lengthiest analyses on the topic pub…
The “historical question” at the end of the Scottish Enlightenment
This study examines the leading early nineteenth-century Scottish moral philosopher Dugald Stewart’s discussion of the origin and development of religion. Stewart developed his account in his final work, The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man (1828), in an effort to show that the fact that polytheism was the first religion of humankind does not undermine the truth of monotheism. He wrote in response to similar discussions presented …
Carr, Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution
American enlightenments
Winterer has penned an engaging and wide-ranging survey of predominantly eighteenth-century North American intellectual history and the process of “enlightenment”. The latter concept is taken to me
Craig Smith, Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society
Unfabling the East
Unfabling the East
Global Entanglements of a Man who Never Travelled
Zhu Zongyuan (fl. 1616 to 1660), a resident of the port city of Ningbo in the Bay of Hangzhou, was both a “fairly conventional member” (10) of the province’s administrative elite and one of only 40
Defining Man as Animal Religiosum in English Religious Writing ca. 1650–ca. 1700
This article surveys the emergence and usage of the redefinition of man not as animal rationale (rational animal) but as animal religiosum (religious animal) by numerous English theologians between 1650 and 1700. Across the continuum of English Protestant thought, human nature was being redescribed as unique due to its religious, not primarily its rational, capabilities. This article charts said appearance as a contribution to debates over man's …
L’île des bannis’
The case of the Channel Island of Jersey is an important yet understudied part of the British Empire’s response to the French Emigration 1789–1815. During its high point in 1792–3, the émigré population in and around Jersey’s main town of St Helier was as large as that in London and one of the European centres of political migration. This article explores the complicated relationship between Jersey’s political institutions, the British military a…
The Experimental Imagination
The Experimental Imagination: literary knowledge and science in the British Enlightenment." The Seventeenth Century, 35(1), pp. 125–126
Karen E. Carter, Scandal in the Parish
Religion, scepticism and John Gregory’s therapeutic science of human nature
This article recovers the discussion of the relationship between religion, human nature and happiness in the Scottish Enlightenment physician John Gregory’s (1724–1773) A Comparative View of Human Nature (1765). Through examining Gregory’s best-selling but understudied text, this article explores how the Aberdeen Enlightenment’s own branch of the wider Scottish ‘science of human nature’, centred at the famous Aberdeen Philosophical Society, was a…
James Beattie, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the character of Common Sense philosophy
Professor of Moral Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen, James Beattie (1735–1803) was one of the most prominent literary figures of late eighteenth-century Britain. His major works, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770) and the two-canto poem The Minstrel (1771–1774), were two of the best-sellers of the Scottish Enlightenment and were key to Beattie’s role in the emergence of both the ‘Scottish School’ of Common Sense Phil…
Berry, Adam Smith
Hanser, Mr. Smith Goes to China
Introduction
No abstract available.
The ‘Almost Wilfully Perverse’ Lord Monboddo and the Scottish Enlightenment’s Science of Human Nature
Egyptomania and religion in James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s ‘History of Man’
The Scottish judge and ‘eccentric’ philosopher James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s (1714–1799) significance within Enlightenment thought is usually seen as stemming from his Origin and Progress of Language (6 vols., 1773–1792). The OPL was a major contribution to the Enlightenment’s debate over the philosophy of language, and established Monboddo’s reputation as an innovative and influential, yet controversial and credulous proto-anthropologist. In th…
Coltman, Art and Identity in Scotland. A Cultural History from the Jacobite Rising of 1745 to Walter Scott
Philosophy (38 works) · History (33 works) · Epistemology (21 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · History (20 works) · Enlightenment (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity (13 works)