Human Nature, Mind and the Self in Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be Human?

This book investigates the problematisation in Adam Smith’s moral philosophy of a classical question: what makes us human beings from a moral standpoint? To do this, Riccardo Bonfiglioli explores the relationship between the concepts of ’human nature’, ’mind’ and ’the self’ in order to reconstruct Smith’s theory of subjectivity. After providing a systematic reconstruction of Adam Smith’s conceptions of ’human nature’, ’mind’ and ’the self’ - exploring some aspects of Smith’s philosophy (nature, philosophy of history, sympathy and imagination) and their empirical expressions (education, conduct and character) - Bonfiglioli argues that, in Adam Smith’s work, the meaning of ’moral human beings’ would depend on the human being’s effort to live in harmony with oneself and the others. According to Bonfiglioli, in Smith’s moral theory, this ’harmony with oneself and the others’ would be achieved in relation to a certain kind of awareness that can be possible when human beings try to judge the conduct and try to act according to the impartial spectator. Specifically, this impartial spectator is reinterpreted by the author in the light of the concept of immediacy.

Riccardo Bonfiglioli is academic tutor and subject expert at the University of Bologna. He is associate member of the Walras-Pareto Centre (University of Lausanne), dynamic psychology researcher and MBSR instructor (Aim Milan).