Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World

by JamesBuchan (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $3.25

  In the early 18th century, Edinburgh was a filthy backwater town synonymous with poverty and disease. Yet by century's end, it had become the marvel of modern Europe, home to the finest minds of the day and their breathtaking innovations in architecture, politics, science, the arts, and economies - all of which continues to echo loudly today. Adam Smith penned The Wealth of Nations . James Boswell produced The Life of Samuel Johnson . Alongside them, pioneers such as David Hume, Robert Burns, James Hutton, and Sir Walter Scott transformed the way we understand our perceptions and feelings, sickness and health, relations between the sexes, the natural world, and the purpose of existence. James Buchan beautifully reconstructs the intimate geographic scale and boundless intellectual milieu of Enlightenment Edinburgh. With the scholarship of an historian and the elegance of a novelist, he tells the story of the triumph of this unlikely town and the men whose vision brought it into being.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $4.20

  How did a notoriously poor, alcoholic, violent and smelly town, consisting of 40,000 inhabitants, make such an impression on its age and on ours? So that Voltaire wrote, with more than a dash of malice that 'today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening'? The leading lights of the Scottish Enlightenment - David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Cullen and James Hutton - transformed the way we treat our perceptions and feelings as well as mechanical processes, sickness and health, trade, money, relations between the sexes, the purposes of existence and government. In just fifty years, Edinburgh produced more philosophical landmarks than a town of its size since the Athens of Socrates. In an account of exceptionally close focus, James Buchan resurrects every aspect of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, and shows how a succession of disasters demolished old systems of thought and behaviour to set Edinburgh's men and women off in strange new directions. Capital of the Mind opens a fascinating window on a glorious time when Edinburgh was the most beautiful and philosophical city in Europe.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $3.25

  How - in the eighteenth century - did a notoriously poor, alcoholic, violent and smelly town, consisting of just two long streets and 40,000 inhabitants, make such an impression on its age and on ours? So that Voltaire wrote with a dash of malice that 'today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening'? In just 50 years Edinburgh had more impact on our ideas than any town of its size since the Athens of Socrates.