Nicholas Phillipson is Honorary Research Fellow in History at Edinburgh, where he has taught since 1965, and author of a celebrated biography of Hume's great friend and intellectual companion, Adam Smith (Allen Lane 2010). He has held visiting appointments at Princeton, Yale, Tulsa, the Folger Library, Washington DC and the Ludwigs-Maximilian Universitat, Munich. He is co-director of a three-year Leverhulme-funded project on the Science of Man in Scotland. He was an associate editor of the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a founder editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History, published by the Cambridge University Press, and is a past president of the Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society.