Professor Gerry Carruthers - Robert Burns and 18th Century Thought
Channel: Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow
Date: 20/03/2023

Professor Gerard Carruthers
Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow
Gerard Carruthers FRSE is Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is General Editor of the Oxford University Press edition of the multi-volume edition of the Collected Works of Robert Burns and Principal Investigator of two projects under the rubric of ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century’ awarded more than £2M from the Arts & Humanities Research Council.
‘Robert Burns & Scottish Thought’. This lecture brings into focus the debt owed to the Scottish Enlightenment by Scotland’s national poet. As well as the influence of philosophy and history on Burns through the work of Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, William Robertson and others, considered also is the related cultural context of the regional ‘Ayrshire Enlightenment’. Here Burns became very involved in the long theological or ‘party’ dispute in his home county between the Moderates (to whom Burns adhered) and the more traditionally conservative Popular Party. Arguably, this intellectual hinterland in Burns remains under-appreciated amid a predominant couching of Burns’s iconicity as a ‘folk’ artist.