Author Description

During his lifetime, George Campbell (1719—1796) was widely known for his contributions to religious thought and life in Britain. He published six sermons, a translation of the Gospels with extensive notes and explanatory dissertations, and Dissertation on Miracles (1762), a widely praised refutation of David Hume’s ‘On Miracles’. Campbell’s influence in the northern churches was eclipsed only when George Hill began to lecture at St Andrews in 1788, and beyond Britain Campbell’s reputation was as an apologist and philosopher of great consequence. By the middle of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, however, only Philosophy of Rhetoric continued to be widely published, and through the last half of the twentieth century scholars have focused their studies on this work, identifying it as a key document in the history of rhetorical theory. Recently, more attention is being directed by scholars in various fields to Campbell’s texts beyond this major work, and scholars are now eager both to reconsider Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric in the context of his other writings and to investigate these works on their own merit. Campbell’s manuscripts and published works offer a rich quarry for scholars interested in rhetorical theory, ecclesiastical politics in eighteenth-century Scotland, theological and philosophical questions, political debates, historiography, and methods of university education.<br/><br/>Volume 1 makes available the complete text of Dissertation on Miracles with related Hume correspondence and reviews. Three sermons addressing urgent and controversial issues of the day are included in Volume 2: The Spirit of the Gospel (1771), The Duty of Allegiance (1776) and An Address to the People of Scotland (1779). All three sermons are important for the way they reveal Campbell’s attitude toward and practice of public debate in the generation following the upheaval of 1745 and in the considerable changes in economic and social conditions of the late eighte