Lecture by Andreas Rahmatian “Lord Kames Legal and Social Theorist”

 Tuesday October 13^th, 2015 at 6pm at the Simone Weil Amphitheater.

Dr Andreas Rahmatian is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, School of Law, since January 2010 where he teaches intellectual property and commercial law. He is a former Fellow at the IAS-Nantes (2014-2015).

The lawyer, philosopher and social theorist Lord Kames (Henry Home)

Lord Kames (Henry Home, 1696-1782) is one of the best known figures of the Scottish Enlightenment by name, and one of the least known in relation to his actual writings. He was a Scottish judge, jurist, philosopher of legal history, moral philosopher, reformer. He was the example of an erudite Enlightenment man and uomo universale. He was in constant intellectual exchange with the philosopher David Hume, and influenced significantly the philosopher-economist Adam Smith and the philosopher of Common Sense philosophy, Thomas Reid, who were both among his élèves.

In this talk Andreas Rahmatian wants to explain Lord Kames’s thought processes, his lines of argument, and, most importantly, his conceptual connections of the areas of aesthetics, moral philosophy, social theory (including political philosophy and anthropology), and law, which Kames regards as being placed on one underlying philosophical framework.

The presentation will focus on Kames’s aesthetic-moral philosophy as a basis of his property theory and social theory of stages of development of human society. It will also discuss Kames’s idea of conjectural-philosophical history and his history of the development of reasoning and of religion.

Andreas Rahmatian’s book, “Lord Kames: Legal and Social Theorist”, was published in 2015 with Edimburgh University Press.


> Download the Leaflet of the lecture in French

> Download the Leaflet in English