This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warberton.

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Adam Smith is the most famous of all economists. His contribution to philosophy is less well known.

A key figure of the 18th century Scottish

Enlightenment Smith taught moral philosophy at Glasgow University and was a close friend

of David Hume. His first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is now rarely read by philosophers,

but perhaps it should be. We would know much more about Smith if he hadn't ordered his

executors to destroy his papers. But Nick Philipson, now retired

from the University of Edinburgh, pieced together the remaining evidence to write

an acclaimed life of Smith. Who better then to give an account of Smith, the philosopher of sympathy, than his sympathetic biographer?

Nick Philipson, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thanks very much for asking me.

We're going to talk about Adam Smith, but particularly Adam Smith on what human beings are like.

Smith is world-renowned as an economist, but he's not generally known as a philosopher.

I know you think he was a great philosopher.

He was a great philosopher and his philosophy really has sunk to the bottom of the pool and he's

become over the years a one book man the author of the

wealth of nations and the author of a particular economic theory but actually he said

you know at the end of his life that he preferred his first book his

theory of moral sentiments to his wealth of nations and Smith was very much in line

with David Hume a great friend of his in his approach to philosophy in that book.

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