90:2 April 2007
The Scottish Philosophical Tradition: Empirical, Phenomenological, Intuitionist 

Advisory Editor: J. J. Haldane

In his study of The Scottish Philosophy - From Hutcheson to Hume (1875) James McCosh identifies three characteristics of the Scottish School: “It proceeds on the method of observation, professedly and really ... It employs self-consciousness as the instrument of observation ... By the observations of consciousness, principles are reached which are prior to and independent of experience”. Whether this adequately characterizes a tradition that reaches from the middle ages (Scotus, Lawrence of Lindores, John Mair) through to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Sir William Hamilton, James Ferrier, Edward Caird) and includes the likes of Hume, Smith and Reid along the way, is itself a matter deserving of discussion. There is no doubt, however, that others, including Hegel, Brentano, and Victor Cousin, have likewise felt that there were distinctive aspects of Scottish philosophy, whether an inclination to realism, a sympathy for common sense, or a resistance to ungrounded abstraction.

This issue of The Monist is devoted to the ideas and doctrines advanced by Scots philosophers in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology and moral philosophy. Essays are invited which explore aspects of Scottish philosophy as these might be described as being empirical, phenomenological and/or intuitionist. The last category might be understood, for example, in terms of the sentimentalist tradition contributed to in different ways by Hutcheson, Smith and Hume; or in terms of the realist idea, associated with Reid and others, that there are necessities antecedent to thought which we encounter in experience and reflection: either extra-mental structures or laws of thought.

Table of Contents:

John Haldane

Introduction: Scottish Philosophy

Gordon Graham

The Ambition of Scottish Philosophy

Daniel Robinson

The Scottish Enlightenment and the American Founding

Paul Russell

Hume’s Lucretian Mission: Is It Self-Refuting?

Margaret Schabas

Groups Versus Individuals in Hume’s Political Economy

John Glassford

Sympathy and Spectatorship in Scottish Writing after Hume

Ryan Nichols

Natural Philosophy and its Limits in the Scottish Enlightenment

James Van Cleve

Reid’s Answer to Molyneux's Question

Dabney Townsend

Dugald Stewart: Beauty and Taste

James Feiser

The Rise and Fall of James Beattie’s Theory of Truth

Jenny Keefe

James Ferrier and the Theory of Ignorance

Mark Weblin

John Anderson on Reid and Scottish Philosophy