Chapter 1 Against common sense

2017 ◽  
pp. 8-19
Author(s):  
Donald Moss
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense

Campus Novels, Camaraderie, and White Nationalist Merriment

2019 ◽  
pp. 22-42
Author(s):  
Travis M. Foster
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Political Disagreement ◽  
Racial Exclusion ◽  
Campus Novel

Chapter 1 highlights the significance of everyday social practices for white sectional reunion after the Civil War, reassessing the form assumed by reconciliation as it transitioned from an object of political contestation to common sense reality. Specifically, it recovers the campus novel, a popular though largely unstudied genre that, despite its sophomoric content, acquired historical weight by turning the practice of campus affections into a metonym for national belonging tacitly predicated on racial exclusion. Focusing on the ability for merriment to overcome and, above all, trivialize intra-white difference, novels like Hammersmith: His Harvard Days (1879) and For the Blue and Gold (1901) enacted a civic pedagogy, becoming handbooks for a sociality that turned political disagreement into jocular affinity, dispute into banter, and racial exclusion into an implicit element of white fellow feeling.

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.

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.

The Objection of David Hume and the Project of Enlightenment

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-71
Author(s):  
Abraham Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Arts

Chapter 1 places Kant’s declaration about his debt to Hume against the background of the Preface to the Prolegomena as a whole. It argues that Kant sees Hume’s attack on metaphysics as a contribution to Enlightenment. Kant praises Hume by opposing his critics, like Beattie, whose invocation of common sense against Hume Kant associates with the Inquisition’s enforcement of orthodoxy via “chisel and hammer.” We must read Kant’s defense of Hume, the Preface argues, against the background of the scandal produced by Hume’s Dialogues. Kant’s evocation of Horace links the Preface with Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” and its motto sapere aude. It must be read alongside Hume’s attack on priestcraft in the Enquiry and in “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences.”

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