'Man as a complex machine' and the 'springs of action': the mechanistic idea of human nature in the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment

The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment had a strongly deterministic idea of the “nature of man”, not only with regard to the physical human body as a complex machine, but also in relation to the human actions and the question of free will and moral decisions. They were influenced especially by Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, and the conception of the moral human being was applied along the lines of natural philosophy (or physics) and the progress-oriented technology that emerged from it. This talk will concentrate on Lord Kames, who was perhaps the most representative or ‘complete’ Enlightenment man in the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume, Adam Smith, and to Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid.