The Rise and Fall of Scottish Common Sense Realism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas McDermid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
External World ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
George Campbell ◽  
Perceptual Realism ◽  
Realism Debate

This book tells the lively story of common sense realism’s rise and fall in Scotland. Chapter 1 explores the work of the Scottish common sense school of philosophy, whose representatives included Thomas Reid (1710–96), James Oswald (1703–93), James Beattie (1735–1803), and George Campbell (1719–96). Chapter 2 examines the earlier but little-known defence of perceptual realism mounted by Lord Kames (1696–1782), David Hume’s cousin and critic. Chapter 3 examines Reid’s defence of common sense realism and scrutinizes his campaign against the Cartesian assumptions on which the problem of the external world depends. Chapter 4 describes how Reidian common sense realism was propagated by two influential nineteenth-century philosophers: Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), who was content for the most part to expound Reid’s views eloquently, and the more ambitious Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856), who tried in vain to synthesize Reid and Kant. Chapters 5 and 6 highlight the two main contributions to the realism debate made by James Frederick Ferrier (1808–64): his no-holds-barred critique of Reid’s realism, and his novel argument for a form of idealism which is both neo-Berkeleyan and post-Kantian. Chapter 7 offers some reflections about the surprising direction Scottish philosophy took in the years following Ferrier’s death in 1864.

Baconianism and the Bible in the Disciples of Christ: James S. Lamar and “The Organon of Scripture”

1986 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Leonard Allen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Disciples Of Christ ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
The Bible ◽  
George Campbell ◽  
Science And Education

Many scholars have observed that during the first half of the nineteenth century American philosophy, science, and education were dominated by Scottish Realism, or the philosophy of “Common Sense.” Its first significant influence has been traced to John Witherspoon, an Edinburgh-trained minister who became president of the College of New Jersey in 1769. Thereafter, especially after 1800, Realist texts were introduced gradually into American colleges, and by the I 820s generally had replaced the older texts. Through use in numerous American colleges, the works of Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, George Campbell, James Beattie, William Hamilton, and others exercised a pervasive influence.

Ferrier, James Frederick (1806–64)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Haldane
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Thomas Reid

Ferrier represents the transition within nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy from the tradition of common-sense realism begun by Thomas Reid, the last major exponent of which was Ferrier’s mentor, Sir William Hamilton, to versions of idealism influenced by German philosophers, especially Hegel. Although he is largely forgotten, Ferrier merits study for at least two reasons. First, he had a role in importing Hegelian ideas into British thought; and second there are parallels between his arguments and those advanced by antirealist philosophers in the analytical tradition.

Dugald Stewart on intellectual character

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER TANNOCH-BLAND
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Character ◽  
History Of

Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) lectured in astronomy and political economy, held the chair of mathematics at Edinburgh University from 1775 to 1785, then the chair of moral philosophy from 1785 to 1810, and wrote extensively on metaphysics, political economy, ethics, philology, aesthetics, psychology and the history of philosophy and the experimental sciences. He is commonly regarded as the last voice of the Scottish Enlightenment, the articulate disciple of Thomas Reid, father of Scottish common sense philosophy. Recently some historians have begun to rediscover elements of the contribution Stewart made to early nineteenth-century British intellectual culture, and his Collected Works have been republished with a new introduction by Knud Haakonssen.

‘Scottish to the Very Core’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas McDermid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
At Home

This chapter describes how Ferrier had the last laugh, despite his failure to be appointed to Sir William Hamilton’s Chair at Edinburgh in 1856. For by the end of the nineteenth century, it was apparent that several of the once-unpopular causes championed by Ferrier in the 1840s and 1850s had triumphed: Thomas Reid was no longer the beau ideal of most Scottish philosophers, the old meta-philosophy of common sense was decidedly out of favour, and idealism had supplanted realism as the metaphysic of choice in many Scottish universities. Although a few grizzled defenders of Reidian-inspired realism could still be found at home and abroad, their way of thinking seemed banal and un-nuanced to a generation of Scottish students who had cut their philosophical teeth on the subtleties of German speculation.

Stewart and Hamilton

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas McDermid
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
External World ◽  
Stewart’S Approach ◽  
The Subject

How did the cause of common sense realism fare in Scotland in the decades immediately following Thomas Reid’s death in 1796? This chapter explores the contributions of the two Edinburgh-based philosophers introduced at the end of Chapter 1: Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) and Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856). Stewart’s approach to the problem of the external world is less intellectually adventurous than what we find in Hamilton, who attempted something difficult and hitherto untried—namely, to arrive at a synthesis of the insights of Reid and Kant. Hamilton’s willingness to learn from Kant and the post-Kantian idealists opened up Scottish philosophy to foreign authors and fresh influences, and this contributed to the backlash against common sense realism which is the subject of Chapters 5 and 6.

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.

Providential Naturalism and Miracles: John Fearn's Critique of Scottish Philosophy

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-94
Author(s):  
Giovanni B. Grandi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

According to Thomas Reid, the development of natural sciences following the model of Newton's Principia and Optics would provide further evidence for the belief in a provident God. This project was still supported by his student, Dugald Stewart, in the early nineteenth century. John Fearn (1768–1837), an early critic of the Scottish common sense school, thought that the rise of ‘infidelity’ in the wake of scientific progress had shown that the apologetic project of Reid and Stewart had failed. In reaction to Reid and Stewart, he proposed an idealist philosophy that would dispense with the existence of matter, and would thus cut at the root what he thought was the main source of modern atheism. In this paper, I consider Fearn's critique of Reid and Stewart in his main works: First Lines of the Human Mind (1820) and Manual of the Physiology of Mind (1829). I also consider Fearn's arguments against Hume and in favour of a renewed apologetics in An Essay on the Philosophy of Faith and the Economy of Revelation (1815).

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.

Ferrier and the Myth of Scottish Common Sense Realism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas McDermid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Thomas Reid

James Frederick Ferrier (1808–64), the first notable British idealist of the nineteenth century and the greatest Scotch metaphysician since Thomas Reid, waged a ferocious dialectical war against common sense realism. This chapter examines “Reid and the Philosophy of Common Sense” (1849), an essay in which Ferrier challenges four aspects of the received view about Reid: (1) That Reid was the first noteworthy opponent of the representationalist doctrine of perception that dominates modern philosophy from Descartes to Hume. (2) That Reid vanquished representationalism, and defended a doctrine of immediate perception. (3) That Reid put paid to Berkeleyan idealism and to veil of ideas scepticism. (4) That Reid vindicated realism by appealing to the plain dictates of common sense. If Ferrier is right in thinking that Reid’s scheme is fundamentally unsound, the tradition of Scottish common sense realism represented by Hamilton has no future.

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