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.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Scripture, Time, and Authority among Early Disciples of Christ

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (4) ◽  
pp. 762-783
Author(s):  
Seth Perry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Sole Source ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Disciples Of Christ ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Alexander Campbell ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Testament Church

This article explores the relationship between the idealization of the Bible and the material characteristics of printed bibles among the Disciples of Christ in the early nineteenth century. The Disciples were founded on the principles of biblical primitivism: they revered the “pure” Bible as the sole source for proper faith and practice. The tenacity with which Disciples emphasized their allegiance to an idealized, timeless Bible has obscured their attention to its physical manifestations and use as printed scripture. The timeless authority of the Bible was entangled with the historical contingencies of mere bibles, and the ways in which they dealt with these tensions offer important perspective on nineteenth-century bible culture. Scholars have treated primitivism as an ahistorical impulse—the idealization of the New Testament church as a mythical sacred era outside of time that could be perpetually inhabited. By contrast, through an examination of the New Testaments edited and published by Disciples leader Alexander Campbell and the heavily-annotated preaching bible of Thomas Allen, an early Disciples preacher, I argue that in seeking to recover the New Testament era through historicized understandings of scripture, primitivists like Campbell and Allen situated the early church itself firmly within historical, not primordial, time.

The Diggers and the Norman Yoke

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-82
Author(s):  
Clare A. Simmons
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
William Blake ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Property Ownership ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Middle Ages

During the English Civil War period, the Diggers asserted that social degree was a product of humanity’s fallen nature, rather than part of God’s plan. Such a claim does not require a historical precedent beyond the Bible, yet the Levellers, Diggers, and other radical reformist groups frequently appealed to the Middle Ages, suggesting that the Norman Conquest was England’s own ‘fall’ from a more equitable political and economic system, and that documents such as Magna Carta marked the people’s efforts to reclaim those rights. The Diggers’ distinct contribution to this discussion, taken up in the nineteenth century by radical thinkers such as Thomas Spence, was that property ownership should be communal. This idea of the Middle Ages survived in the radical reformist tradition into the nineteenth century and can be found in the medievalism of William Blake, William Morris, and many others. The theory of the Norman yoke remained a significant influence on social and racial theory in Britain for much of the nineteenth century.

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.

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.

Nineteenth-Century American Biblical Interpretation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Noll
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Bible And Slavery

Nineteenth-century interpretation reflected traditional Protestant devotion to scripture and hermeneutical conventions from American experience, especially the democratic empowerment of ordinary people and a republican resentment of intellectual aristocracy. In the antebellum era, interpretations flowed from long-standing Protestant convictions adjusted to republican common sense. Contention over the Bible and slavery generated the sharpest differences. After false starts from Tom Paine in the 1790s and a few New Englanders in the 1840s, modern biblical criticism affected interpretations from the 1870s. In the postbellum era, some Protestants adopted a more liberal understanding of scripture because of the earlier standoffs over slavery. Groups previously marginalized (Catholics, Jews, skeptics, women, African Americans) also became more visible.

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.

The Bible in the Civil War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Standard Mode ◽  
Civil War Era

Americans of the Civil War era expressed considerable certainty about how biblical passages applied to the dramatic contemporary events of 1861‒1865. Clergy, laypeople, and soldiers on both sides freely divined God’s purposes in history and suggested scriptures to back up their often apocalyptic prognostications. As with the battle for the Bible in the slavery controversy, however, the standard mode of biblical exegesis for mid-nineteenth-century Protestants, common-sense realism, provided such a plethora of answers about the meaning of contemporary events that there was no clear answer. The Bible did not speak plainly. More than just about any theologian or minister, Abraham Lincoln understood that and articulated it in 1865.

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