==================== HES POSTING ======================= [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. ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]