scholarly journals Scottish Common Sense and Nineteenth-Century American Law: A Critical Appraisal

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Mikhail
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
American Law ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
The Mind

One overriding concern I have with Susanna Blumenthal's insightful and stimulating article, “The Mind of a Moral Agent: Scottish Common Sense and the Problem of Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century American Law,” is whether there is anything sufficiently distinctive about Scottish Common Sense philosophy that justifies the role Blumenthal ascribes to it. In a representative passage, she writes:Common Sense philosophy left would-be “moral managers” with a puzzle. If rational and moral faculties were innate and universal, what explained the great conflicts among men concerning matters of belief, manners, and morals … leading some to commit acts that were … patently irrational or downright evil? And to the extent that therewasa common sense about the dictates of reason, propriety, and moral sense, why did some individuals act in defiance of them?

Treitschke: National Prophet

1945 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 418-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Kohn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
The Mind

Machiavelli was a man of the Italian Renaissance; yet Mazzini shows no trace of Machiavellian thought, and Mussolini's attempt to revive Machiavelli in his homeland failed lamentably and ignominiously. Italy lacked the power and the hardness of character which Machiavellianism presupposes. Piedmont was an imitation Prussia, but only an imitation Prussia. Machiavelli's ideas bore real fruit in nineteenth century Germany. The German inclination to force ideas in the “free realm of the mind” to their logical and absurd conclusions without regard for the limitations of reality and common sense, combined with Prussia's power and hardness of character to implant Machiavellianism firmly in Germany. While German statesmen like Frederick II and Bismarck were its ablest disciples, its noblest teacher and prophet was Heinrich von Treitschke.

Common Sense Regeneration: Alexander Campbell on Regeneration, Conversion, and the Work of the Holy Spirit

2016 ◽  
Vol 109 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-636
Author(s):  
Stephen Waers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Alexander Campbell ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
Major Factors

Alexander Campbell (1788–1866), a controversialist and prolific writer, often addressed his theological opponents with an acid-tipped pen. Early in his career, few topics received as much attention as regeneration, conversion, and the role of the Holy Spirit. Campbell and his coreligionists on the frontier were hardly the only theologians who focused on these doctrines during the first half of the nineteenth century. Campbell's early polemics make it clear that he had substantially modified or rejected many of the major tenets of the Presbyterianism of his youth regarding these topics. His early writings find his literary resources arrayed against such doctrines as human inability and metaphysical regeneration that his Reformed opponents held. Campbell's biographer even tells us that Campbell's views of regeneration and conversion shifted. In this paper, I argue that one of the major factors driving Campbell's rejection of these widely held Reformed doctrines was his appropriation of the thought of John Locke and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy (SCSP). More specifically, I argue that Alexander Campbell's understanding of testimony, firmly rooted in the thought of Locke and SCSP, was the sine qua non of his conception of regeneration, conversion, and the work of the Holy Spirit.

George Combe and common sense

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEAN DYDE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Relative Success ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mind

AbstractThis article examines the history of two fields of enquiry in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland: the rise and fall of the common sense school of philosophy and phrenology as presented in the works of George Combe. Although many previous historians have construed these histories as separate, indeed sometimes incommensurate, I propose that their paths were intertwined to a greater extent than has previously been given credit. The philosophy of common sense was a response to problems raised by Enlightenment thinkers, particularly David Hume, and spurred a theory of the mind and its mode of study. In order to succeed, or even to be considered a rival of these established understandings, phrenologists adapted their arguments for the sake of engaging in philosophical dispute. I argue that this debate contributed to the relative success of these groups: phrenology as a well-known historical subject, common sense now largely forgotten. Moreover, this history seeks to question the place of phrenology within the sciences of mind in nineteenth-century Britain.

Witherspoon, John (1723–94)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.J. Fechner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Political Office ◽  
Academic Philosophy

John Witherspoon, Scottish-American clergyman, political leader and educator, was born at Gifford, East Lothian, educated at Edinburgh University and ordained Presbyterian minister. In his mid-forties he went to America as president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University. He held political office for New Jersey and played a major role in organizing the Presbyterian Church in America and improving the College at Princeton. Witherspoon was representative of eighteenth-century Scottish and American Calvinists who tried to reconcile their orthodox theological doctrines with the Enlightenment’s philosophical currents of empiricism, scepticism, and utilitarianism by harmonizing reason and revelation. Although Witherspoon was a philosophical eclectic, Francis Hutcheson’s moral sense philosophy was the major source of his utilitarian ethics and republican politics. Witherspoon was not an original thinker, but his popularization of Scottish common sense and moral sense philosophy through his forceful personality and effective teaching laid the foundation for its dominance of nineteenth-century American academic philosophy.

Beattie, James (1735–1803)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Wood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
The Mind

James Beattie was famed as a moralist and poet in the late eighteenth century, and helped to popularize Scottish common-sense philosophy. At Marischal College, Aberdeen, Beattie cultivated a lecturing style which differed significantly from that of his Aberdonian predecessors. Because he believed that the form of abstract analysis characteristic of the science of the mind in his day often led students into the morass of Humean scepticism, Beattie endeavoured to inculcate sound moral and religious principles through the study of ancient and modern literature. Consequently his version of common-sense philosophy diverged from that developed by Thomas Reid. Beattie was more of a practical moralist than an anatomist of the mind, and his treatment of common-sense epistemology lacked the philosophical range and rigour of Reid’s.

The Scottish Theological Diaspora

2019 ◽  
pp. 190-202
Author(s):  
Cairns Craig
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
John Watson ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
Thomas Mcculloch

Scots were disproportionately influential in the founding of Canadian educational institutions and Scottish Common Sense philosophy was almost universal as the context for theological discussion in nineteenth-century Anglophone Canada. When Common Sense was challenged by the theory of evolution in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was replaced by another Scottish philosophy, the idealism of Edward Caird, which presented religious belief as itself an evolutionary phenomenon. This chapter traces the influence of Scottish philosophy on prominent Scoto-Canadian philosopher-theologians, including Thomas McCulloch, J. W. Dawson, John Clark Murray, John Watson, Lily Dougall, and Walter Williamson Bryden.

The Mind of a Moral Agent: Scottish Common Sense and the Problem of Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century American Law

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna L. Blumenthal
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agent ◽  
Physical Disorder ◽  
Medical Jurisprudence ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
American Law ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
The Will ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Made In

Addressing an audience of medical students in 1810, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush recounted a recent call he had made, in consultation with a Dr. Physick, to the residence of “a lady in this city, equally admired for her amiable virtues and elegant accomplishments.” As they were seated in the parlor, she related her medical complaint: “I am blessed with one of the best of husbands, and a family of promising children, whom I love most affectionately,” she began, “and yet, in the paroxysms of my disease, and with the perfect exercise of my reason, I wish for an ax, that I might split open their heads, and lay them all dead at my feet.” Upon hearing this terrible confession, Rush was convinced that he was faced with a case of “moral derangement.” By this, he meant “that state of mind in which the passions act involuntarily through the instrumentality of the will,” a condition he linked to an underlying physical disorder. Since this form of derangement was most clearly manifest in the commission of crime, Rush explained, it was invariably mistaken for ordinary depravity in courts of law, with tragic results. In fact, he reckoned that if his patient were to succumb to her morbid impulses, her fate would be sealed: all her virtues and accomplishments would prove insufficient to save her “from expiating her disease by an ignominious death.” Rush further observed that there was cause for concern on the civil side of the docket as well, for it appeared that the morally deranged were left free to make wholly unnatural dispositions of their estates, to the great injury of their unoffending families. In light of this state of affairs, he charged his students with broader “objects and duties” than simply caring for their patients. It was, he insisted, a physician's civic obligation to extend the benefits of his science “to the protection of property and life” through the cultivation of a distinctly “medical jurisprudence.”

scholarly journals The Metaphysics of Mind and the Practical Science of the Law

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah A. Seo ◽  
John Fabian Witt
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
Practical Science ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Law ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Metaphysics Of Mind

In “Mind of a Moral Agent,” Susanna Blumenthal elegantly limns the rise and partial fall of the common sense theory of moral responsibility in American law. As Blumenthal convincingly describes it, the problem for early American jurists was nothing less than to solve the paradox of determinism and free will. How can the law declare someone morally culpable unless we are free to choose our own ends?

Mind and Matter

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
The Impact

The first section of Chapter 3 examines a period of transition in the early nineteenth century when Presbyterian commitment to Common Sense philosophy and induction was challenged by modern geology and philosophical idealism. By the early 1840s, a consensus had developed about the proper relationship between science and religion that utilized the insights of Joseph Butler, Thomas Chalmers, and James McCosh. When Presbyterians responded to Darwin and Mill they declared the indispensable link between philosophy and theology, and the supremacy of mind and conscience. The chapter concludes by considering the impact of John Tyndall’s notorious Belfast Address of 1874. Despite the controversy it caused, the issue quickly subsided and Irish Presbyterians felt able to adopt a variety of positions. Rather than a concern with biblical hermeneutics, it was the moral and metaphysical implications of evolutionary theory which were of main concern to Presbyterians.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document