Enlightenment, Scottish

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Wood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
David Hume ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Modern Learning ◽  
Intellectual Revolution ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Church

Rooted in the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment was a branch of the Moderate Enlightenment that dominated the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. Enlightenment in Scotland crystallized c.1690 and was the creation of three groups: the virtuosi led by Sir Robert Sibbald, clergymen in the Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches who promoted religious moderation and modern learning, and the first generation of Scottish Newtonians. All three helped to remodel Scotland’s five universities and, by the 1720s, Scottish academics were in the vanguard of Enlightenment across Europe In the 1730s Francis Hutcheson's work on moral theory and aesthetics gave a new impetus to Scottish philosophy. Later, during the heyday of the Scottish Enlightenment c.1745-c.1783, David Hume transformed the study of the science of man through his writings on the anatomy of the mind, politics, economics, history and religion. But because Hume’s work was regarded as irreligious, he was denied an academic post in 1745 and attempts to have him excommunicated from the Church of Scotland in the mid-1750s gained broad support.Hume’s irreligious scepticism provided the stimulus for the rise of Thomas Reid’s school of common sense philosophy, which to some extent revivified Scottish intellectual life from the 1760s onwards. Nevertheless, the Scottish Enlightenment went into decline c.1783 and, by the time of Dugald Stewart’s death in 1828, had largely faded from view.

scholarly journals John Glas and the Development of Religious Pluralism in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 527-545 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALASDAIR RAFFE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Government

This article discusses John Glas, a minister deposed by the Church of Scotland in 1728, in order to examine the growth of religious pluralism in Scotland. The article begins by considering why Glas abandoned Presbyterian principles of Church government, adopting Congregationalist views instead. Glas's case helped to change the Scottish church courts’ conception of deposed ministers, reflecting a reappraisal of Nonconformity. Moreover, Glas's experiences allow us to distinguish between church parties formed to conduct business, and those representing theological attitudes. Finally, Glas's case calls into question the broadest definitions of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, drawing attention to the emergence of pluralism.

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....

Early Enlightenment Shifts

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-55
Author(s):  
Christian Maurer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Rational Debate ◽  
Short Time Span ◽  
The Status ◽  
Doctrine Of The Church ◽  
Short Time ◽  
The Church

This chapter focuses on the tensions concerning doctrinal matters between several Committees for Purity of Doctrine of the Church of Scotland and the three Divinity professors John Simson (1667–1740), Archibald Campbell (1691–1756), and William Leechman (1706–85). It analyses how the themes of innovation, toleration, and rational debate marked theological debates in the early stages of the Scottish Enlightenment. The cases of Simson, Campbell, and Leechman exemplify how in a relatively short time span, the General Assembly and the Kirk started dealing with doctrinal debates concerning orthodoxy and heresy in a more moderate manner, and how the status of the Confession of Faith was subject to discussion, even if there were no proper debates on subscription in eighteenth-century Scotland.

Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
David Hume ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Ideal Theory ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
Competing Ideas ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Ideal

This book explores the philosophical and historical significance of common sense philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment. As one of eighteenth-century Scotland’s most original intellectual products, the Scottish ‘school’ of common sense philosophy developed as a viable alternative to modern philosophical scepticism known as the ‘Ideal Theory’ or ‘the way of ideas’. The philosophical writings of Thomas Reid and David Hume factor prominently in the volume as influential authors of competing ideas in the history and philosophy of common sense. In the chapters of this volume, which all embody original and innovative research, the contributors recover anticipations of Reid’s version of common sense in seventeenth-century Scottish scholasticism; re-evaluate Reid’s position in the realism versus sentimentalism dichotomy; shed new light on the nature of the ‘constitution’ in the anatomy of the mind; identify changes in the nature of sense perception throughout Reid’s published and unpublished works; examine Reid on the non-theist implications of Hume’s philosophy; show how ‘polite’ literature shaped James Beattie’s version of common sense; reveal Hume’s response to common sense philosophers; explore English criticisms and construction of the ‘Scotch school’; and illustrate how Dugald Stewart’s refashioning of common sense responded to a new age and the British reception of German Idealism. In recovering the ways in which Scottish common sense philosophy originally developed in response to the Ideal Theory in Britain during the long eighteenth century, this volume takes an important step toward a more complete understanding of ‘the Scottish philosophy’ in the age of Enlightenment.

Philosophy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Contents

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

Between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment

2019 ◽  
pp. 14-26
Author(s):  
Paul Helm
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Representative Selection ◽  
Adult Lives ◽  
The Church ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter is an attempt to gauge the theology of the Church of Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century by considering a representative selection of theological writers of that period. Each of those considered—Thomas Blackwell, Robert Riccaltoun, and Thomas Halyburton—held parish ministries, two them for most of their adult lives, and two of them held chairs of theology. Distinct personalities, each upheld the position of the Westminster Standards con animo. Yet each reveal in their different ways an awareness of changes that the Enlightenment was bringing, calling for adaptation to the literary form of theology, or in its apologetic direction.

Commerce, Virtue, and Politics: Adam Ferguson's Constitutionalism

1983 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary L. McDowell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Philosophers

Adam Ferguson was one of several moral philosophers who contributed to the Scottish Enlightenment, a period aptly described as one of “remarkable efflorescence.” The works of Ferguson and his fellow Scotsmen — Adam Smith, David Hume, Dugald Stewart, Lord Kames, Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid — were widely distributed, seriously read, and vigorously debated during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The greatest contribution of this Scottish school to the history of political thinking was the refinement of the idea of commercial republicanism, the synthesis of modern notions of polity and economy.

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.

scholarly journals A Protestant Purgatory? Visions of an Intermediate State in Eighteenth-century Scotland

2018 ◽  
Vol 97 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha McGill
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intermediate State ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Standard Element ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
The Church

The protestant afterlife is generally presented in binary terms, with departed souls going directly to either heaven or hell. However, the possible existence of an intermediate state for the dead was discussed by protestant theologians from the reformation onwards. This article traces the evolution of these debates in Scotland, with particular focus on the eighteenth century. The bishops Archibald Campbell, Thomas Rattray and George Innes produced tracts in support of the intermediate state. By the end of the century it had become a standard element of doctrine among the episcopalians, reflecting the formation of a more distinctive theological and liturgical identity, based on the teachings of the early church fathers. Presbyterians generally dismissed the idea as a papish conceit, but there were exceptions. Most notably, in the 1720s the minister William Ogilvie described a series of meetings with the ghost of Thomas Maxwell, Laird of Cool. His account framed the intermediate state as a sympathetic alternative to calvinist predestination, and spread to a wide audience when it was printed as a chapbook. As the episcopalian church declined and the Church of Scotland fragmented, there was greater scope for individuals to formulate their own theologies, potentially challenging traditional notions of what it meant to be a protestant.

The History of Scottish Theology, Volume II

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Civic Architecture ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Liturgical Reform ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

This second volume in The History of Scottish Theology comprises 29 essays ranging from the early Enlightenment to the end of the ‘long nineteenth century’. Attention is devoted to key doctrinal and apologetic themes relating to the inheritance of Reformed orthodoxy and the appearance of deism, as well as to newer challenges and revisionist approaches that later emerged. The extent to which the mid eighteenth-century scholars of the Church of Scotland were committed to the movement that later became known as ‘the Scottish Enlightenment’ is discussed by several contributors who explore the importance of Moderate and Evangelical trends. The influence of nineteenth-century continental developments, including kenotic Christology, idealism, and biblical criticism, is also registered, alongside exploration of the issues raised by religious scepticism, slavery, and the natural sciences. Several essays are devoted to describing the wider dissemination and refraction of theological ideas in Gaelic women’s poetry, Scottish literature, liturgical reform, preaching, hymn writing, and civic architecture. The international influence of Scottish theology is also described, both through the work of important thinkers who migrated to the USA and in the establishment of Scots colleges in Europe.

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