Scottish Philosophy after the Enlightenment

Highlights the continued flourishing of Scottish philosophy after the Scottish Enlightenment by exploring the work of underappreciated figures and themes

• Engages with philosophical issues including the science of human nature, realism versus idealism, the relation of metaphysics and psychology, the impact of evolutionary biology on religious thinking, and the recurrent debate between theism and agnosticism
• Draws attention to an important set of typically overlooked Scottish philosophers working after the golden age of Hume, Smith and Reid
• Integrates cultural history and philosophical inquiry

Beginning with Sir William Hamilton’s revitalisation of philosophy in Scotland in the 1830s, Gordon Graham takes up the theme of George Davie’s The Democratic Intellect and explores a century of debates surrounding the identity and continuity of the Scottish philosophical tradition.

Gordon Graham identifies a host of once-prominent but now neglected thinkers – such as Alexander Bain, J. F. Ferrier, Thomas Carlyle, Alexander Campbell Fraser, John Tulloch, Henry Jones, Henry Calderwood, David Ritchie and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison – whose reactions to Hume and Reid stimulated new currents of ideas.

Graham concludes by considering the relation between the Scottish philosophical tradition and the 20th-century philosopher John Macmurray.