The Scottish Philosophy: Biographical Expository, Critical from Hutcheson to Hamilton

by James McCosh

The Scottish School of Common Sense was a school of philosophy that flourished in Scotland in the late 18th, early 19th centuries. Its roots can be found in responses to the writings of such philosophers as John Locke, George Berkeley & David Hume, where its most prominent members were, among others, Thomas Reid and William Hamilton, who combined Reid's approach with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The peculiar influence it had on philosophers elsewhere in Europe, not to mention in the USA, exemplified by the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce, is considerable.

A central concern of the school was to defend common sense against philosophical paradox & scepticism. It argued that common-sense beliefs govern the lives and thoughts even of those who avow non-commonsensical beliefs and that matters of common sense are within "the reach of common understanding". The qualities of its works weren't generally consistent; Edward S. Reed writes, e.g., "[Whereas] Thomas Reid wished to use common sense to develop philosophical wisdom, much of this school simply wanted to use common sense to attack any form of intellectual change."

Genres: Philosophy

481 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1875

About the author

James McCosh was a prominent philosopher of the Scottish School of Common Sense. He was president of Princeton University from 1868 to 1888.

McCosh was born of a Covenanting family in Ayrshire, and studied at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, obtaining his M.A. at the latter, at the suggestion of Sir William Hamilton, for an essay on stoicism. He became a minister of the Established Church of Scotland in 1834, serving as pastor first at Arbroath and then at Brechin. He sided with the Free Church of Scotland in the Disruption of 1843, becoming minister at Brechin's new East Free Church. In 1850 or 1851 he was appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen's College, Belfast (now Queen's University Belfast).

In 1868 he travelled to the United States to become president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). He resigned the presidency in 1888, but continued to teach philosophy until his death.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was read as part of my research assistantship at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Ellos was doing work in Scottish philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and had me reading facsimiles of texts by writers covered only in specialist classes. Usually my job was to simply cull texts according to themes he was interested in as these books had no indexes. This particular book, so far as I recall, has chapters devoted to one Scottish philosopher after another, summarizing their views.