Political economy and natural history: The Scottish case

• Grant number: 19/10270-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: November 15, 2019
• End date: January 29, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Pedro Paulo Garrido Pimenta
• Grantee: Pedro Paulo Garrido Pimenta
• Host Investigator: Laurent Jaffro
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France

Abstract

The idea is to read some writings by Hume, Smith and Ferguson so as to inquiry into the relations between political economy and the natural sciences - physiology, anatomy and taxonomy - and understand the analogies and assimilations between these different kinds of knowledge in the 18th Century. As such, the project is an extension of an inquiry that I have been carrying out since 2016 when I presented my thesis on Oragnism and teleology in the era of Enlightenment (published two years later) and that was further developed with a two month research grant at the University of Edinburgh given to me by Fapesp in 2017 (process ref. 2016/24781). The general aim of these researches is to study how the empiricist philosophical tradition from Hume onwards (especillay in Scotland) gave rise to a particular kind of reflexon concerning the nature of living beings. As I have been showing in my studies, this reflexion is not only highly original in itself, but also is applied, in different ways and thorugh particular methods, by the philosophers in question as a kind of scheme through which it is possible to duly comprehend phenomena related to the production and circulation of riches as part of a general theory concerning the political order.