ABSTRACT
‘The study of human nature’ was clearly the pursuit in which Adam Smith was ‘formed to excel’. But as his first biographer Dugald Stewart also tells us, his favourite subjects at the University of Glasgow were science and mathematics. Roderick Firth introduced the term ‘ideal observer’ in 1952, an idea sometimes said to have originated two centuries earlier with Smith. ‘Men conceive perfection’, to quote Adam Ferguson, but they ‘are capable only of improvement’. The function of a vision of perfection, he says, is to provide ‘a light to direct their progress’. The appeal of the ‘hinge’ form of Newtonianism is its explanatory parsimony, something that traditionally has been highly prized in philosophy and theoretical science. Montes acknowledge that Newton was understood in ‘radically different ways’, which makes it ‘difficult to identify a unified Newtonian tradition in the moral sciences’.
