Presentation materials
The precocious Smithian essay on the “History of Astronomy", part of the posthumously published Essays on Philosophical Subjects, provides a list of intellectual sentiments focusing on the often overlooked difference between wonder, surprise, and admiration but, oddly, not curiosity - each of them contend for the early modern equivalents of the ancient Greek θαυμάζειν. Surprisingly Smith...
This paper offers a new perspective on the importance of Sophie de Grouchy’s 1798 translation of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. I argue that the text’s rarely noted (and still untranslated) “Avertissement” should revise our understanding of the work in two ways. First, Grouchy notes that her appended Letters on Sympathy will “trace the line between the two schools of French and...
The aim of the Italian economist Francesco Ferrara was the academic and social affirmation of a political economy that would show people the right path for material and civil progress. The latter was conceived as the conquest of ever more and greater freedom for the individual, in the belief that only freedom could guarantee advancement. Among the various initiatives that Ferrara undertook to...
