The Epistemologies of Progress

This Element discusses the new consideration of the ambiguities inherent in eighteenth-century thought on the epistemologies of progress and the fast-growing body of scholarship identifying the role of scepticism in Enlightenment philosophy across Europe.

Introduction; 1. James Dunbar and the 'Instinctive Propensities' of lay knowledge; 2. John Millar and the certainties of colonialism; 3. Ossian and the biases of commercial modernity; Conclusion; Bibliography.