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.

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).

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.

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.

scholarly journals The Hero as Seer: Character, Perception and Cultural Health in Carlyle

2009 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Gavin Budge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Erasmus Darwin

Abstract A rhetoric of spectrality pervades Thomas Carlyle’s writings, in a way which is intimately related to his characteristic position of “natural supernaturalism.” This essay argues that Carlyle’s rhetorical emphasis on spectral hallucinations in his descriptions of social upheavals such as those of revolutionary France reflects the influence on his work of physiological theories of perception stemming from the medical thought of Erasmus Darwin, theories which are frequently invoked in early nineteenth-century theories of ghosts and apparitions. Carlyle’s preoccupation in his historical writing with the figure of the “Great Man” also reflects this medical context, in that the Great Man’s superior ability to perceive the reality of his historical moment is understood by Carlyle as indicative of a superior cultural “health” that he manages to convey to the society of his time, contrasted by Carlyle with the state of feverish delirium characteristic of revolutionary situations. The essay suggests that this relationship to theories of perception aligns the Carlylean “Great Man” to the figures of the Wordsworthian poet and the Romantic genius more generally, and also helps to explain the Victorian emphasis on “character,” of which the Carlylean historiography of “Great Men” is an example. The placing of individual character at the centre of accounts of perception by nineteenth-century thinkers such as Carlyle and Ruskin reacts against the determinism associated with Enlightenment thought’s assumption that in perception the mind is passively imprinted with sense-data, and reflects the influence of the alternative account of perception as a process of interpretation of signs put forward by Thomas Reid and other Common Sense philosophers.

The Physiology of Mind, the Unity of Nature, and the Moral Order in Victorian Thought

1981 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. S. Jacyna
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
The State ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mind

In 1879 G. H. Lewes described the state of current British mental science. There were, he maintained, three main ‘schools’ of psychology. The first of these Lewes called the ‘ontological’ school; its members traced their lineage to Thomas Reid and to the common sense philosophers of the early nineteenth century, especially Dugald Stewart and William Hamilton. The second school was the ‘empirical’, which stood in the tradition of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Condillac, Hartley, and James Mill. The ontologists and the empiricists differed in their theories of knowledge: the former held that certain beliefs were native to the mind; the latter that all ideas originated, mediately or immediately, from experience. However, both schools agreed on the object of psychological enquiry. They ‘quietly ignore the complex conditions of the living organism, and treat mental facts simply as the manifestations of a Psychical Principle’. Further, the ontological and empiricist schools concurred on the means by which this principle should be studied; both made introspection the ‘exclusive method of research’.

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 Legacy of Reid's Common Sense in Analytic Epistemology

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Mark Boespflug
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The Common

The common sense that heavily informs the epistemology of Thomas Reid has been recently hailed as instructive with regard to some of the most fundamental issues in epistemology by a burgeoning segment of analytic epistemologists. These admirers of Reid may be called dogmatists. I highlight three ways in which Reid's approach has been a model to be imitated in the estimation of dogmatists. First, common sense propositions are taken to be the benchmarks of epistemology inasmuch as they constitute paradigm cases of knowledge. Second, dogmatists follow Reid in taking common sense propositions to provide boundaries for philosophical theorizing. Inasmuch as philosophical theorizing leads one to deny a common sense proposition, such theorizing is stepping outside of the bounds of what it can or should do. Third, dogmatists follow Reid in focusing heavily on the problem of skepticism and by responding to it by refusing to answer the demand for a meta-justification that the skeptic wants.

Thomas Reid on Causation and Scientific Explanation

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Barrantes ◽  
Juan M. Durán
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
The Common

We argue that there is no tension between Reid's description of science and his claim that science is based on the principles of common sense. For Reid, science is rooted in common sense since it is based on the (common sense) idea that fixed laws govern nature. This, however, does not contradict his view that the scientific notions of causation and explanation are fundamentally different from their common sense counterparts. After discussing these points, we dispute with Cobb's ( Cobb 2010 ) and Benbaji's ( Benbaji 2003 ) interpretations of Reid's views on causation and explanation. Finally, we present Reid's views from the perspective of the contemporary debate on scientific explanation.

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