Alexander Gillies, Adam Smith, and Eighteenth-Century Scottish Freemasonry

Professor Eugene Heath’s presentation returns us to the eighteenth century. Heath will focus on a student of Adam Smith’s at the University of Glasgow, Alexander Gillies, who became a freemason and a Presbyterian minister (at the Church of Kilmaurs).  On December 20, 1766, Gillies delivered a talk on freemasonry and brotherly love at the Mother Lodge in Kilwinning.  This discourse was then published (1768) as a small book and, much later, in two installments in The Freemason’s Magazine (1794).  Prof. Heath’s lecture will inform us about Gillies as a student of Smith and he will show how Gillies’s discourse on freemasonry and brotherly love drew from Smith’s class on Moral Philosophy at the University.  Prof. Heath will elaborate on other interesting details about Gillies and offer some remarks on religion and freemasonry within the eighteenth century.

Eugene Heath is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he teaches courses on ethics, political and social philosophy, and the history of modern philosophy.  Along with editing or co-editing several collections of essays he has published essays on important figures of eighteenth-century British moral thought. His current research focuses on the concept of self-love, particularly as employed by Adam Smith in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Streaming:

Thursday, September 23, 2021

7:00 PM on YouTube Live

Updated 8/31/21