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[NOTE: The following summary is provided by Wendy Motooka, who organized
this session. I asked her to provide a brief report on the session because
some HES subscribers would be interested in the session, but few would
have attended. -- RBE]
The session on "Who Owns Adam Smith: Competition Among Disciplines"
happened from 8:30-10:00 am last Thursday, in Nashville at the annual
meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. The
speakers were Robert Urquhart (Dept. of Economics, University of Denver),
who spoke on "Who Wants to Own Adam Smith, Anyway?"; James R. Otteson
(Dept. of Philosophy, University of Chicago), who spoke on "The Recurring
'Adam Smith Problem'"; and Maureen Harkin (Dept. of English, Stanford
University), who spoke on "Adam Smith, Literary Community, and
Disciplinary Limits." The respondent was David M. Levy (Center for Study
of Public Choice, George Mason U). The session was sparsely attended at
first, owing I think, to the earliness of the hour, but filled up by the
end. What the papers brought out collectively, and in the discussion from
the floor, was the fundamental difference between Newtonian and
post-structuralist approaches to Adam Smith's work. At issue was the
differing conceptions of "truth" across disciplines, i.e., whether Smith
is read as "science" or as "literature," and what constitutes the
difference between these two categories. The discussion was lively, and
the panelists appeared to be enthused about the session.
James Otteson's paper was recently awarded the ASECS prize for the best
paper by a graduate student presented at the conference.
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