"No distinction of Black or Fair": The Natural History of Race in Adam Ferguson's Lectures on Moral Philosophy

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has emphasized the increasing importance, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, of the concept of race. Yet race was a conceptual, moral, and taxonomic puzzle for Scots intellectuals such as Adam Ferguson (1723-1816). While the influence of Ferguson's published works has received wide scholarly attention, the content of his teaching has not. His surviving moral philosophy lecture notes offer us a window into the development of thought on race at the disciplinary intersections of moral philosophy and natural history, and the crossroads of Edinburgh's curricula and Britain's Empire.