The “New Empire of Common Sense”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul B. Wood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy

Although the rise of Scottish common sense philosophy was one of the most important intellectual developments of the Enlightenment, significant gaps remain in our understanding of the reception of Scottish common sense philosophy in the Atlantic world during the second half of the eighteenth century. This chapter focuses on the British context in the period 1764–93, and examines published responses to James Oswald, James Beattie, and, especially, Thomas Reid. The chapter contextualizes the polemics of Joseph Priestley against the three Scots and argues that it was Joseph Berington rather than Priestley who was the first critic to claim that the appeal to common sense was the defining feature of “the Scotch school” of philosophy. It also shows that Reid was widely acknowledged to be the founder and most accomplished exponent of the “school”, whereas Beattie and Oswald were typically dismissed as being derivative thinkers.

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.

Common Sense School

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Wood
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
George Campbell ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy

The school of common sense philosophy originated in the mid-1730s in Aberdeen in the circle of clergymen and academics associated with Thomas Reid. During the 1750s and 1760s the details of the philosophy of common sense were developed by Reid, Alexander Gerard and George Campbell, largely in response to the irreligious implications of Hume’s writings. Their ideas subsequently served as the starting point for the different formulations of common sense philosophy published by James Beattie and James Oswald. Beattie, Oswald and Reid were widely attacked in the 1770s and 1780s for their appeals to common sense, most notably by Joseph Priestley and Immanuel Kant. These attacks prompted Dugald Stewart to reformulate the appeal to common sense principles in the 1790s. However, Stewart’s version of common sense philosophy found little support in Scotland and the school effectively disappeared with his death in 1828.

Buffier, Claude (1661–1737)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Manns
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
External World ◽  
Inner Experience ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
External Reality ◽  
The Common ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy

A French Jesuit who flourished in the early eighteenth century, Buffier developed an outlook that he referred to as common-sense philosophy. While deeply influenced by the philosophies of Descartes and Locke, he saw their reliance on the testimony of inner experience to be conducive to scepticism concerning the external world. In reaction to this, he sought to establish the irrevocable claims of various ‘first truths’, which pointed towards external reality and qualified it in various respects. His work anticipates certain themes that surfaced later in the common-sense philosophy of Thomas Reid.

Reid and the Foundations of Scottish Common Sense

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas McDermid
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The Public ◽  
George Campbell ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
Speculative Thought

In the Preface to his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) famously complained that common sense is the last refuge of the cynical and ambitious littérateur who, lacking any real aptitude for speculative thought, seeks to win over the public by consecrating their inherited prejudices. The aim of this chapter is to explain where and why Kant’s interpretation of Scottish common sense philosophy goes awry. The work of four early Scottish common-sensists is explored: Thomas Reid (1710–96), James Oswald (1703–93), James Beattie (1735–1803), and George Campbell (1719–96). As Thomas Reid is by far the best-known and most accomplished member of this group, his system is treated as the sun by whose light three less brilliant bodies of work can be seen and measured.

scholarly journals Nathaniel William Taylor and Thomas Reid: Scottish common-sense philosophy's impact upon the formation of New Haven theology in Antebellum America

2005 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-82
Author(s):  
Michael W. DeLashmutt
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Mass Conversion ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
New Haven Theology ◽  
The Relationship

This paper will examine the relationship between Scottish common-sense philosophy and the formation of New Haven Theology. It will be illustrated that Nathaniel William Taylor's adaptations of orthodox Calvinism (particularly the doctrines of election and predestination and total depravity) relied heavily upon the principles of common-sense philosophy found in the work of Thomas Reid. Furthermore, it will be argued that Taylor's adaptation of Calvinism was a necessary accommodation to the phenomenon of mass conversion and evangelism during the Second Great Awakening.

Possible Theological Perspectives in Thomas Reid's Common Sense Philosophy

1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
The Common ◽  
Philosophical Writings ◽  
Theological Thinking ◽  
The Way

It is well known that Thomas Reid, premier exponent of the Common Sense school of Scottish philosophy, was an ordained and active minister. Less clear is the role played by theology in the deve opment ofthat philosophy as it matured slowly under his pen, particularly in me most prominent of his works, the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and the Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788), works which range widely over the field of human experience and the nature of reality. When philosophy and theology assumed more distinct and separate identities in the generations which succeeded Reid, it became common for critics of the Common Sense school to base their analyses solely on philosophical foundations and to neglect the theological underpinning which is essential to a fuller and clearer grasp of Keid s position. It would be a useful contribution to more than one discipline were Thomas Reid's philosophy linked more closely to the development and extent of his theological thinking. While his philosophical writings are strewn with theological references in the way typical of the eighteenth century, there is more substance in these references than is usually the case, when divines ofthat age wrote philosophy. That they are much more than casual, conventional embellishments becomes apparent from a careful reading of his works.

Hamilton, William (1788–1856)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
H.O. Mounce
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
The Mind

Sir William Hamilton was a leading exponent of the Scottish philosophy of ‘common sense’. This philosophy had its origin in the works of Thomas Reid, but it was through Hamilton that it achieved its most subtle form and exerted its greatest influence. ‘Common-sense’ philosophy, on a superficial view, may seem to hold that philosophical problems should be settled by appealing to the commonly accepted opinions of ordinary people. But that is not what it holds. The ‘common sense’ to which it refers are certain powers and beliefs natural to the mind and therefore common alike to the learned and vulgar. Hamilton holds that these powers and beliefs can neither be doubted nor justified. They carry their own authority. This view derives its significance from a point which has often been overlooked. When we doubt or justify a belief, we stand outside that belief and compare it with the world. But the power to compare a belief with the world itself presupposes beliefs about the world. We cannot step outside all our beliefs. That is why, according to Hamilton, certain powers and beliefs must carry authority.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. B. Bow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
The Mind

This volume of essays considers the philosophical and historical significance of common sense philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment. As one of eighteenth-century Scotland’s most original intellectual products, common sense philosophy dominated the teaching of moral philosophy and the “science of the mind” at Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen universities during the last quarter of the century, and also informed many Presbyterian clergymen’s treatment of human nature from the pulpit....

Aberdeen Philosophical Society

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Wood
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
George Campbell ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
The Mind

The Aberdeen Philosophical Society (1758–73) played a formative role in the genesis of Scottish common sense philosophy. Its founder members included the philosopher Thomas Reid and the theologian George Campbell. Its discussions favoured the natural and human sciences, particularly the science of the mind, and one of its central concerns was the refutation of the work of David Hume.

Charismatic Authority in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
Napoleon Bonaparte ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Charismatic Authority ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The French Revolution

The essay examines the emergence, during the eighteenth century, of what the author calls the figure of the charismatic revolutionary leader. It shows how an image of virtuous, powerful, redeemers and founder-figures became enormously popular in the Atlantic World during the 1760s. It goes on to consider the characteristics associated with these figures, tracing their roots in such sources as the Enlightenment cult of genius, the eighteenth-century worship of “les grands hommes,” new forms of celebrity, and the sentimental novel. It discusses the applicability of the Weberian definition of “charisma” to the figure, and distinguishes it carefully from monarchy. The essay then explores the consequences of this transformation for our understanding of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.

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