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Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment C. B. Bow
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN13: 9780198783909
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198783909.001.0001
(p.vii) Notes on the Contributors
Charles Bradford Bow
Charles Bradford Bow
is an Assistant Professor of Global Intellectual History at Yonsei University. His research on the intellectual history of Enlightenment(s) and imperialism has appeared in Modern Intellectual History, The Scottish Historical Review, Historical Research, History of European Ideas, History, Intellectual History Review, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, and EighteenthCentury Scotland
Claire Etchegaray
is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris Ouest— Nanterre La Défense and member of the Institut de Recherches Philosophiques (IRePh). Her research interests involve the Scottish Enlightenment, human nature, judgment, reasoning, and scepticism. Her research has appeared in the journals History of European Ideas, Archives de philosophie, and in the volumes Croiton comme on veut? Histoire d’une controverse; Revue de métaphysique et de morale: Le scepticisme aux limites de la question; Histoire d’une controverse; Medical Empiricism and Philosophy of Human Nature in the 17th and 18th Century; and Scepticism in the Eighteenth Century: Enlightenment, Lumières, Aufklärung.
Go to page: Go
Giovanni Gellera
is Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Lausanne in the Swiss National Science Foundation project ‘Tolerance, Intolerance and Discrimination Regarding Religion’ (2016–20). At the University of Glasgow, he worked in the Leverhulme Project ‘Scottish Philosophers in 17th-Century Scotland and France’ (2010–14) and wrote a Ph.D. thesis (2012) on seventeenth-century Scottish philosophy. He works on the interactions between scholasticism and early modern philosophy, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. His research has appeared in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, History of Universities, Intellectual History Review. With Alexander Broadie, he is working on the first edition and translation of the Idea philosophiae moralis by James Dundas (1679), for Edinburgh University Press.
Gordon Graham
is Henry Luce III Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at Princeton Theological Seminary. His areas of academic interest include aesthetics, moral philosophy, philosophy of religion, and the Scottish philosophical tradition. He is Director of the Center for the Study of Scottish Philosophy at Princeton and founding editor of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy. (p.viii) Giovanni B. Grandi
is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus. His research on Scottish philosophy has appeared in Journal of Scottish Philosophy, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Journal of Scottish Thought, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and EighteenthCentury Thought. He is the editor of Thomas Reid: Selected Philosophical Writings (2012).
James A. Harris
is Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Hume: An Intellectual Biography (2015) and Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in EighteenthCentury British Philosophy (2005). He has published articles on Hume, Hutcheson, Reid, Beattie, Priestley, and a number of themes in eighteenth-century British philosophy. He is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in EighteenthCentury Britain (2013), and also (with Aaron Garrett) of Volume one of Scottish Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment (2015). He has edited texts by Reid (with Knud Haakonssen), Beattie, Kames, and Abraham Tucker. He has held fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and in 2012–13 was Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton).
Esther Engels Kroeker
is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Antwerp. Part of her research is focused on Reid’s moral psychology. She has published papers on Reid’s moral philosophy, moral perception, and agency.
(p.x)
Some of her recently published articles are Reid on Natural Signs, Taste and Moral Perception (2009), Reid’s Moral Psychology: Animal Motives as Guides to Virtue (2011), and Acting from a Good Conscience: Reid, Love, and Moral Worth (2013). Her research extends to David Hume’s moral psychology and philosophy of religion, and her work also focuses on the contemporary debate surrounding love and practical reasons. She is the co-editor (with Katrien Schaubroeck) of Love, Reason and Morality (2017).
R. J. W. Mills
is Teaching Fellow in the History of Political Thought at the University College London. He has articles published or in press on numerous Scottish thinkers including James Beattie, Archibald Campbell, Henry Home, Lord Kames, and Alexander Ross and is currently working on a book about the Scottish Enlightenment’s application of the ‘science of human nature’ to the study of religion.
Paul B. Wood
Professor Emeritus in the History Department at the University Victoria in Canada who has published widely on the Scottish Enlightenment. For the Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid he has edited Thomas Reid (p.ix) on Mathematics and Natural Philosophy (2017), (with Knud Haakonssen) Thomas Reid on Society and Politics (2015), The Correspondence of Thomas Reid (2002), and Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation (1995). He is currently at work on the final volume in the series, Thomas Reid and the University, with Alexander Broadie.
Copyright © 2018. All rights reserved.
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment
C. B. Bow
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198783909
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198783909.001.0001
Introduction
Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment
C. B. Bow
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198783909.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This volume of essays considers the philosophical and historical significance of common sense philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment. As one of eighteenth-century Scotland’s most original intellectual products, common sense philosophy dominated the teaching of moral philosophy and the “science of the mind” at Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen universities during the last quarter of the century, and also informed many Presbyterian clergymen’s treatment of human nature from the pulpit....
This volume of essays considers the philosophical and historical significance of common sense philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment. As one of eighteenth-century Scotland’s most original intellectual products, common sense philosophy dominated the teaching of moral philosophy and the “science of the mind” at Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen universities during the last quarter of the century, and also informed many Presbyterian clergymen’s treatment of human nature from the pulpit.1 Reflecting on the
importance of this philosophical system, which was widely known as “the Scottish philosophy” by the nineteenth century, the Presbyterian divine and philosopher James McCosh wrote:
Scottish metaphysicians and moralists have left their impress on their own land, not only on the ministers of religion, and through them upon the body of people, but also on the whole thinking mind of the country. The chairs of mental science in the Scottish colleges have had more influence than any others in germinating thought in the minds of Scottish youth, and in giving permanent bias and direction to their intellectual growth.
(McCosh, 1875: 8)
In these ways common sense philosophy informed the understanding and exercise of human improvement in the intellectual and moral culture of the Scottish Enlightenment.2
Thomas Reid popularized prominent features of this philosophical system, which were later used as criteria to identify the Scottish “school” of common (p.2) sense philosophy.3 Writing in 1764, Reid recalled that when he was initially confronted with David Hume’s brand of scepticism in the 1740s, Hume’s “reasoning appeared to me to be just: there was therefore a necessity to call in question the principles upon which it was founded, or to admit the conclusion” (Reid, 1764: iv). Eventually Reid countered Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) with An Inquiry into the Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764). Dugald Stewart, who had studied under Reid at Glasgow University in 1771–2, later remarked that Reid’s “leading design was evidently to overthrow the modern system of scepticism” (Stewart, 1811: 452–3). In order to establish a new empirical system for future inquiries in the science of mind Reid focused on vindicating his “principles of common sense” and undermining the “Ideal Theory” upon which he believed modern scepticism was founded. Stewart highlighted the philosophical significance of Reid’s attack on the “way of ideas” when he wrote that, “On the refutation of the ideal theory […] Dr. Reid himself was disposed to rest his chief merit as an author […] and something, perhaps, has been added to his labors by those of his successors” (Stewart, 1822: 354). The ways in which Reid and moralists associated with the Scottish “school” of common
sense developed a viable alternative to Humean scepticism and the Ideal Theory is the overarching theme of the essays which appear in this volume.
The volume originated from the British Society for the History of Philosophy’s 2014 annual conference hosted by Edinburgh University and supported by the Mind Association, Scots Philosophical Society, and Taylor & Francis publishers. Featuring the research of philosophers and intellectual historians from nine countries and over twenty cities, the three-day conference explored new avenues to better understand the place of common sense philosophy within the Scottish Enlightenment. While the scholarly exchange between philosophers and intellectual historians is not new, this dialogue, as we experienced it, encourages a deeper and more complete examination of philosophical ideas and their historical value. This volume, which is the first edited collection devoted exclusively to the philosophy and history of Scottish common sense during the long eighteenth century, presents the fruits of the exchanges which took place at the conference.4 The philosophical writings of Thomas Reid and David Hume factor prominently in the volume as influential authors of competing ideas in the history of common (p.3) sense philosophy. While recent scholarship traces the transnational reception of common sense philosophy, this volume centres on recovering its understudied significance in British contexts.5 The following chapters, which all embody original and innovative research, shed new light on prominent features of this philosophical system, including the methodological use of the inductive method, the subscription to universal self-evident principles regarded as instincts rooted in human nature, the conscious awareness of the intellectual, active, and moral powers of mind, and the belief in a providential God. This introduction offers a brief overview of the philosophical themes, historical contexts, and philosophers examined in this volume.
René Descartes (1596–1650) was considered by Reid to be the founder of the Ideal Theory, which was also known as the “way of ideas” or “theory of ideas” in the Enlightenment. Beginning with seventeenth-century Scottish scholastics, Scottish moral philosophers responded to Descartes’ philosophy in a variety of ways. His Discourse on Method (1637) and Principles of Philosophy (1644) appealed to mathematical principles in formulating a “rational” philosophical approach to
metaphysics, epistemology, and morals.6 John Marshall suggests that Descartes’ ideal moral theory was intended as an “exact science”, rather than a mere technique of self government.7 As a new type of epistemological scepticism, Descartes brought scholastic direct “realism”, which accepted the existence of transcendental universals within the material and moral worlds, into question as a reliable belief system. After removing “weak” beliefs concerning divinely inspired material existence, Descartes’ ideal theory accepted “only what is certain and unshakable”, which did account for some “realist” beliefs concerning the existence of the material world in his Meditations (Descartes, 1996: 17). The Cartesian ambition to secure the foundations of human knowledge in order to construct a rigorous deductive system of the sciences challenged the principles of Aristotelian scholasticism. Although he was a professed Catholic, Descartes’ intervention in theological and philosophical debates of the early seventeenth century initiated a prolonged controversy over his treatment of the “rational soul” and our knowledge of God’s causal powers.8 Whereas sharp philosophical divisions emerged between scholastics and Cartesians in continental Europe during the seventeenth century, Scottish philosophers in the period sought to harmonize Descartes’ ideas with scholastic philosophy.
(p.4) The literature on the seventeenth-century Scottish reception of Cartesianism was, until recently, dominated by the scholarship of C. M. Shepherd.9 With a focus on seventeenth-century graduation theses at Scottish universities, Giovanni Gellera refines the scope of Shepherd’s earlier work on Scottish philosophical debates of the period by examining how Descartes’ philosophy affected Scotland’s Reformed philosophy in higher education. According to Gellera, around the middle of the century Scottish university curricula instituted a variety of reforms in response to Cartesianism. These changes were best shown in new Reformed doctrinal characteristics in the teaching of metaphysics, natural philosophy, and epistemology.10 The broader diffusion of this Reformed Scottish scholasticism, as Alasdair Raffe argues, signified a transitional moment in Scotland’s intellectual culture.11 In the first chapter “Common Sense and Ideal Theory in Seventeenth-Century Scottish Philosophy”, Gellera documents the extent to which seventeenth-century Scottish scholastic philosophers
anticipated two of Thomas Reid’s main criticisms of the Ideal Theory. Scottish scholastic theorists maintained that belief plays a part in sense perception and that the general reliability of the senses is a first principle of knowledge. This treatment of sense perception as furnishing reliable and direct evidence regarding the existence and the nature of the external world (the view known as “realism”) suggests that there were important doctrinal continuities between seventeenth-century Scottish scholastic theorists and the common sense philosophers of the Enlightenment era.
One of the most important forums for the development of common sense philosophy was the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, which was also known as the “Wise Club”. Founded in 1758 to discuss “philosophical” subjects, the Wise Club boasted a membership drawn from the professional elite of Aberdeen and the north-east of Scotland that included George Campbell, John Gregory, David Skene, Alexander Gerard, Thomas Reid, and James Beattie.12 According to Thomas Reid, the writings of David Hume dominated discussions within the Society. On 18 March 1763, Reid wrote to Hume:
Your Friendly Adversaries Drs Campbel & Gerard as well as Dr Gregory return their Compliments to you respectively. A little Philosophical Society here of which all the three are members, is much indebted to you for its Entertainment […] If you write no more in morals politicks or metaphysicks [sic], I am afraid we shall be at a loss for Subjects.
(Reid, 2002: 31)
(p.5) Hume figured prominently in the proceedings of the Wise Club largely because his radical scepticism alerted Reid and other common sense theorists to the dangers of the Ideal Theory. In addition to Humean scepticism, common sense philosophers discussed theories endorsed by Descartes, John Locke, George Berkeley, and Nicholas Malebranche as exemplars of the Ideal Theory.13 Above all, undermining Hume’s contributions to the “way of ideas” persisted as a central pursuit in the justification and development of Scottish common sense philosophy.
John Locke’s (1632–1704) invention of British empiricism and its application to epistemology received attention among Hume and common sense philosophers.14 In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke’s theory of ideas famously rejected the existence of innate ideas with the concept of tabula rasa. His theory of ideas and their operations showed the ways in which agents acquire knowledge of the external world through the reflection of experiences.15 In an appeal to Locke’s anti-innatism and empiricism, Hume also sought to transform the science of the mind through the use of the “experimental method of reasoning” (Hume, 2009: 114–15). Hume recommended that anatomists of human nature engage in the “cautious observation of human life”, and attend to the evidence regarding our intellectual and moral powers found “in the common course of the world […in] men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures” (Hume, 2009: 6).
Of this approach to the science of mind, Reid informed Hume that, “I have learned more from your writings in this kind than from all others put together” (Reid, 2002: 31). Reid shared Hume’s criticisms of Locke’s allegedly ambiguous treatment of “ideas” as a placeholder for all contents of the mind.16 One of Hume’s revisions to Locke’s theory of ideas included the distinction between perceptions of “ideas” drawn from reasoning and the “impressions” of emotions, passions, and sensations.17 On this distinction, Reid was alarmed that rendering knowledge of the world wholly dependent on psychologically intermediate “impressions”, which led to “ideas”, made Hume’s system and the “way of ideas” more generally indefensible against philosophical scepticism. Consequently, Reid and his fellow common sense philosophers addressed this concern by developing a new philosophical system (p.6) to investigate and safeguard the science of the mind from the dangers of modern scepticism.
The use of the term “common sense” to describe “mother wit” or a conscious intuitive sense perception did not originate with Reid or within the Wise Club. The philosophical writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), George Berkeley, the Bishop of Cloyne (1685–1753), and Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) previously popularized this belief in Scottish moral philosophy. In developing an early Enlightenment version of “sentimentalism”, Shaftesbury argued that the “sense of right and wrong [is] as natural to us
as natural affection itself, and being a first Principle in our constitution and there is no speculative opinion, persuasion or belief which is capable immediately or directly to exclude or destroy it” (Shaftesbury, 1999: 179).18 In A Treatise
Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Berkeley’s theory of “immaterialism”, which attempted to strengthen religious conviction by removing the consideration of the material world, offered another alternative to Locke’s theory of ideas. But that world has to be understood, metaphysically speaking, as a set of ideas in the mind of God according to Berkeley.19 While Reid praised Berkeley’s attempt to safeguard religious convictions and defend the “vulgar” or general common sense perceptions of reality from philosophical error, he believed “immaterialism” rendered evidence and knowledge of the material world impossible.20 For Reid, the unavoidable scepticism of Berkeley’s system was an unintended consequence of following the “way of ideas”.
As Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University between 1729 and 1746, Hutcheson’s moral theory on the natural virtues of humankind and moral-sense cognitivism drew heavily from Shaftesbury’s example of “sentimentalism”.21 Hutcheson remarked that “to each of our powers we seem to have a corresponding taste or sense, recommending the proper use of it to the agent, and making him relish or value the like exercise of it by another” (Hutcheson, 1755: 59). While Hume drew from the writings of Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson in developing his version of moral sentimentalism, Reid appealed to Hutcheson’s example of the “moral sense” in illustrating the “moral faculty”. According to Reid, “the testimony of our moral faculty, like that of the external (p.7) senses, is the testimony of nature, and we have the same reason to rely upon it” (Reid, 1788: 238). Reid’s account of the moral sense differed from Hutcheson’s in that Reid argued that agents do not simply sense moral qualities as Hutcheson had claimed but form moral judgments through their active powers of mind. This important distinction situates the innate human ability to improve the faculties of mind as part of nature’s design.
The ways in which David Hume and Thomas Reid treated sense perception differently informed the realist and antirealist dichotomy within which they are so often categorized and understood.22 Hume’s moral empiricism observed human conduct through the use of sense perception. At the same
time, he believed that emotional “impressions” of observed objects and behaviour informed “ideas” of their properties. This belief led Hume to deny the existence of moral properties. Contrary to Hume, Reid trusted the testimony of natural sense perceptions associated with the intellectual and active operations of the mind. In Chapter 2, “Was Reid a Moral Realist?”, Gordon Graham examines the extent to which Reid could be considered a moral realist by comparing his “objective” reality against Hume’s sentimentalist morality. He questions if Reid’s opposition to Humean philosophy encouraged the general categorization of Reid as a moral realist. Graham provides evidence to interpret Reid’s use of the analogy between moral sense and sense perception in a way that does not imply the existence of “real” moral properties. Reid situated judgment as central in this analogy, which suggested that the exercise of an intellectual “power” had primacy over passive sensual experience. The analogy, therefore, allowed him to apply the concepts “true” and “false” to moral judgments without any quasi-realist appeal to moral facts. With a focus on Hume’s treatment of feelings versus reason and the limits of Reid’s “objective” realism, Graham suggests nuanced reasons why Reid’s philosophy did not strictly adhere to the realist and anti-realist dichotomy in modern philosophy.
Thomas Reid’s and David Hume’s shared interest in furthering the science of the mind require further qualifications where their paths diverge. Paul Wood suggests that in understanding Reid’s philosophy “we must first recognize that Reid was as much a man of science as he was a moralist” (Wood, 2004: 71).
Reid’s earlier studies at Marischal College, Aberdeen from 1722 to 1726 under the direction of George Turnbull introduced him to the philosophy of mind conceived of as an experimental science. Turnbull remarked:
I was led long ago to apply myself to the study of the human mind in the same way as to the study of the human body, or any other part of Natural Philosophy: that is, to (p.8) try whether due enquiry into moral nature would not soon enable us to account for moral, as the best of Philosophers teaches us to explain natural phenomena.
(Turnbull, 1740/2005: 8)
Reid’s enthusiasm for Francis Bacon’s inductive method, which Isaac Newton (1642–1726) popularized in physics, later played a central part in his moral philosophy. Reid suggested that “he who philosophizes by other rules, either concerning the material system, or concerning the mind, mistakes his aim” (Reid, 1764: 3). Unlike Hume, Reid identified a set of universal self-evident instinctive beliefs innate in human nature, namely the “principles of common sense”. Since these widely held beliefs could not be proven, Reid believed that the “principles of common sense” allowed anatomists of the mind to explore the operations of our mental powers without needing to re-establish the foundations of human knowledge. Reid and common sense philosophers challenged the Ideal Theory, as exemplified by Hume’s Treatise (especially in Book I), because this theory denied one or more of these self-evident principles of common sense.
Building upon self-evident principles of common sense, this system’s emphasis on the intellectual and active powers of the natural constitution of the mind engaged with the broader debate on “causation” in British philosophy. The debate on causation questioned the extent to which God intervened in earthly causes and effects, and whether agents acted out of necessity or possessed the power to cause an intended effect. While Hume was concerned with the nature of the necessity that links a cause to its effect, Reid argued that, “the name of a cause and of an agent, is properly given to that being only, which, by its active power produces some change in itself, or in some other being” (Reid, 1788: 276).23 Reid’s treatment of causality appealed to Samuel Clarke’s Natural and Revealed Religion (1705), which he had developed as a Boyle Lecturer at St Mary-le-Bow Church in London. According to R. F. Stalley, “Reid’s endorsement of Clarke’s argument shows that, for him too, the idea that we are free agents is bound up with the idea that motives are not causes” (Stalley, 2004: 44).
George Pappas shows that Reid’s view of causality was somewhat prefigured in Berkeley’s philosophy.24 Reid suggested that the concept of necessity reduced all human actions to the exclusive determination of God and, therefore, denied any human freedom in choosing to act or refrain from an action. According to Reid, if the system of necessity existed “there can be no moral government, nor moral obligation [and] there can be no display of moral attributes” (Reid, 1788: 309).
(p.9) In these ways Reid identified intellectual and active powers of the natural constitution as the way for agents to merit moral approbation.
The literature on Reid’s treatment of causality links his entwined notion of sense perception, moral judgment, and “realism” discussed in Chapter 2.25 The question of how these operations of the natural mental “constitution” factored into Reid’s version of common sense philosophy is understudied in the literature. The term “constitution” received various meanings in early modern medicine, moral, and natural philosophy. In Chapter 3, “Reid on Our Mental Constitution”, Claire Etchegaray contributes new insight to a more precise understanding of Reid’s treatment of the mental “constitution” by examining the ways in which he accounted for knowledge of reality and discernment of truth in the anatomy of the mind. In doing so, Etchegaray evaluates Reid on belief-justification and his reference to our mental constitution as an already truthful informant of a knowing subject. Reid did not simply suggest that knowledge was a natural gift from God. Reid’s anatomy of the mind sought to explain how natural powers operate in providing access to reality. With a particular focus on Reid’s undated and still unpublished manuscript “Of Constitution”, Etchegaray distinguishes Reid’s approach to the anatomy of mind from subjectivism. For Reid, the “first principles of common sense”, as fixed maxims of the mental constitution, provided an explanation of why mental powers functioned independently from divine intervention. Etchegaray concludes on the originality of Reid’s anti-scepticism by showing the ways in which he treated the “constitution” of the mind as a subject of knowledge.
In Chapter 4, “On the Ancestry of Reid’s Inquiry”, Giovanni Grandi shows that Reid’s rejection of the Ideal Theory implied that sensations were not copies of external qualities such as extension and figure. While Reid’s Inquiry suggested that spatiality did not affect the order of sensations, his earlier unpublished manuscripts on the subject did not deny that sensations were arranged spatially. Grandi argues that the differences in Reid’s treatment of sense perception responded to contextual considerations. Reid primarily denied that ideas of extension and figure were copied from any single atomic sensation. At the same time, he also argued that the spatial relations among atomic sensations were detected by an act of judgment. The perception of these relations did not require a
new sense impression. Only subsequently, possibly motivated by his commitment to the immateriality of the soul, did Reid explicitly reject the view that sensations were arranged spatially and arrived at the belief that the primary qualities of external bodies were detected by direct acts of perception. With this in (p.10) mind, Grandi offers an explanation of why the Scottish philosopher John Fearn (1768–1837) interpreted Reid’s philosophy as rejecting the idea that sensations were extended. According to Grandi, Fearn developed this reading of Reid in order to avoid making the soul extended and thus material, and also to avoid Hume’s scepticism on the soul’s existence.
The belief in a providential God as the architect of the natural constitution of the mind and of the natural world was a central feature of Scottish common sense philosophy. Reid argued:
Common sense and reason have both one author; that almighty Author, in all whose other works we observe consistency, uniformity, and beauty, which charm and delight the understanding; there must, therefore, be some order and consistency in the human faculties, as well as in other parts of his workmanship.
(Reid, 1764: 132)
Reid did not claim to understand the entirety of God’s purpose for creating a natural constitution with limited freedom, but he suggested that understanding and working toward the perfection of this natural constitution enabled the exercise of moral obligations to oneself, others, and God. According to Reid, humans are “not merely a tool in the hand of the master, but a servant, in the proper sense, who has a certain trust, and is accountable for the discharge of it” (Reid, 1788: 309). While Reid did not draw evidence from revealed religion in developing this belief, he recognized, in Humean scepticism, the theological consequences of separating human nature from divine inspiration and intent.
In Chapter 5, “A Common Sense Response to Hume’s Moral Atheism”, Esther Kroeker considers Reid’s response to the non-theist implications of Hume’s moral philosophy. Kroeker identifies three key non-theist implications of Hume’s philosophy, which formed his moral atheism, targeted by Reid: Hume’s claim that morality was tied to human nature and
autonomous from divine or religious motives; natural faculties and human passions were not directed toward God; and God was not (and could not be) the object of any moral discourse. Hume suggested morality was secular and autonomous from religious doctrines, beliefs, and motivations. Although Reid agreed with Hume that morality was separate from divine intervention, Reid claimed that the standard of morality was not necessarily relative to human nature or divorced from examples in revealed religion. Kroeker argues that Reid’s treatment of moral evaluations sought to undermine Hume’s denial of the existence of a benevolent God. In doing so, Kroeker shows the ways in which Reid explicitly considered his moral philosophy as an answer to Hume’s moral atheism.
The systematic rejection of the Ideal Theory and Hume’s philosophy in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society was well established when James Beattie (p.11) (1735–1803) joined the “Wise Club” after his appointment to Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic at Marischal College in 1760. In Chapter 6, “The Common Sense of a Poet”, R. J. W. Mills examines Beattie’s contribution to the philosophy of common sense in his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770) as a different kind of response to Hume’s philosophy. Mills documents that Beattie distinguished himself as a poet, and his unanticipated venture into moral philosophy, which later resulted in his Essay, originated from debate in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society. But Beattie’s membership to the “Scotch school”, as Mills argues, is problematic. Unlike Reid, Campbell, and Gerard, Beattie’s version of common sense did not examine the anatomy of the mind. He did not restrain his assault on Humean scepticism in targeting Hume’s character. Beattie’s inclination toward literature, which resembled Addison’s notion of morality, and his deep commitment to defending Christian religious principles meaningfully, distanced his moral thought from that of his peers in the “Scotch school”.
The chapters discussed thus far show the ways in which Reid and Beattie, as exemplars of the “Scotch school”, challenged Humean scepticism as the most prominent example of the Ideal Theory in Enlightened Scotland. In Chapter 7, “Hume and the Common Sense Philosophers”, James Harris discusses the extent to which Hume responded to Reid and philosophers associated with the Scottish “school” of common sense. Hume famously called the “Advertisement” he wrote for the 1777
edition of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding “a compleat answer” to the oppositional writings of Reid and Beattie. According to Harris, what he meant was that the Enquiry answers unfair criticisms aimed at his Treatise (1739–40). Harris addresses the question of how exactly the Enquiry answered those criticisms. Harris argues that it clarified the nature of Hume’s scepticism, and, in particular, explained that Hume’s scepticism did not affect everyday life, which common sense theorists had claimed. What Hume’s common sense critics failed to understand, as Harris shows, was that Hume sought to make a complete break between his brand of mitigated scepticism and ancient philosophical scepticism. Humean scepticism was not a way of life, and not a route to the summum bonum, according to Harris. The dispute between Hume and the common sense philosophers shows the difficulty that Hume’s contemporaries had in understanding that he had completely abandoned the ancient conception of philosophy as medicina mentis.
Common sense philosophers were not the first to identify their collective use of this philosophical system as a distinct school of thought. In Chapter 8, “The ‘New Empire of Common Sense’”, Paul Wood recovers the historical reception of common sense philosophy in Britain by tracing the birth of the Scottish “school” of common sense with particular attention to Joseph Priestley’s famous criticism (p.12) of Reid, James Oswald, and James Beattie. Wood’s chapter builds upon the earlier research of James Fieser, Robin Mills, and Mark Towsey by examining previously neglected manuscripts from critics such as the English Catholic Joseph Berington (1743–1827) and the Irish Protestant Philip Skelton (1707–87).26 Wood argues that it was Berington rather than Priestley who was the first critic to claim that the appeal to common sense was a distinctive feature of the “Scotch school” of philosophy. In this deeply researched chapter on critical assessments of these Scots, Wood shows that Reid was widely acknowledged to be the founder and most accomplished exponent of the “school”. Beattie and Oswald in contrast were generally dismissed as being derivative thinkers whose ill-conceived notions of common sense threatened to subvert the rational belief in Christianity. These contemporary criticisms of Reid, Oswald, and Beattie affected the next generation of common sense philosophers at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Late eighteenth-century criticisms of the “Scotch school” did not go unnoticed among Scottish moralists. Of Reid’s intellectual disciples, Dugald Stewart defended the use of Scottish common sense philosophy as Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1785 to 1810.27 In the ninth and final chapter, “Dugald Stewart and the Legacy of Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment”, C. B. Bow explores the ways in which Stewart contributed to the endurance of Scottish common sense philosophy during two transitional periods in Scottish intellectual culture. Bow discusses Stewart’s enrichment of Reid’s philosophy by developing a modern system of moral education during an age of revolutionary change following the British reception of French revolutionary principles. Unlike Reid, who never published a supplemental prospectus or outline for his courses at Aberdeen and Glasgow, Stewart’s “didactic eloquence” reached a wider audience beyond his classroom. In the preface to his final publication, Stewart identified that his readers included “many individuals, not only from England and the United States of America, but not a few from France, Switzerland, the north of Germany, and other parts of Europe” (Stewart, 1828: v). In Scottish contexts, Stewart’s system of moral education diffused his version of common sense philosophy among prominent figures of the Scottish Whig party and contributors to the Edinburgh Review at the dawn of this new age. The second section of Chapter 9 turns to Stewart’s defence of Scottish common sense philosophy in response to the early nineteenth-century Scottish reception of German Idealism. (p.13) This objective appeared in Stewart’s Dissertation Exhibiting a General View of the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical and Political Philosophy (1815–21) as a supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica. In tracing the development of modern philosophy Stewart suggested reasons why he believed Scottish common sense philosophy was superior to Immanuel Kant’s “Critical Idealism” and his belief that Kant’s response to Hume in treating “causation” lacked originality. Considered by many to be the “Scotian Plato”, Scottish common sense philosophy flourished under the care of Stewart during two of the most transitional moments in the final decades of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Following Stewart’s death in 1828, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle claimed that “Dugald Stewart is dead, and British Philosophy with him” (Carlyle, 1828: 396). The later
writings of nineteenth-century Scottish philosophers, including Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856), James Ferrier (1808–56), J. S. Mill (1806–73), and Alexander Bain (1818–1903) among others, suggest that the Scottish philosophical tradition did not fade into obscurity.28 The objectives of nineteenth-century Scottish philosophers, however, did not resemble Stewart’s attempt to defend, refine, and sustain the legacy of the “Scotch school”. The emergence of Scottish Idealism and Utilitarianism, which staunchly criticized the “Scotch school” and, in particular, Hamilton’s “Natural Realism” as a response to Humean scepticism, suggested an end to the use of common sense philosophy at Scottish universities and as a method of improvement in nineteenth-century Scottish intellectual culture.29
While nineteenth-century Scottish philosophers criticized the “Scotch school” in adapting versions of imported philosophical systems, the transnational diffusion of common sense philosophy renewed its use on either side of the Atlantic. Significant changes to Scottish common sense philosophy, like German Idealism and Utilitarianism in nineteenth-century Scotland, accompanied the use of this philosophical system in different national contexts. The translations of Reid and Stewart’s works by Pierre Paul Royer-Collard (1763–1845), Victor Cousin (1792–1867), and Théodore Jouffroy (1796–1842), for example, influenced the development of a distinct French “school” of common sense philosophy.30 Dugald Stewart expressed pleasure in reading “the very elegant translation by M. Jouffroy of my Outlines of Moral Philosophy, preceded by a long introduction full of original and important matter” (Stewart, 1828: xii). Cousin’s inclusion of (p.14) “large extracts from the same work [Outlines], comprising nearly the whole of” Fragments Philosophiques (1826) encouraged Stewart’s optimism for the future of common sense philosophy “in some other countries as well as my own” (Stewart, 1828: xii).31 But the dominance of German Idealism in continental Europe throughout the nineteenth century affected the reception and development of French and German versions of common sense in an attempt to reconcile these competing systems.
The diaspora of Scottish philosophers throughout the British Atlantic world did not encounter this problem in their use of common sense philosophy. Their efforts to reconstruct the Scottish philosophical tradition from abroad merit an
important place in the legacy of common sense philosophy.32
James McCosh, who served as the President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) between 1868 and 1888, authored the best example of reconstructing an intellectual history of common sense philosophy. His exploratory intellectual biography, The Scottish Philosophy (1875), of prominent Scottish Enlightenment thinkers (including Hutcheson, Turnbull, Reid, James Oswald, John Witherspoon, Beattie, Stewart, and Hamilton) revealed an ambition to pave a future path for a new version of common sense philosophy in America. In doing so, McCosh’s philosophy departed from the Scottish “school” of common sense in significant ways.33 In explaining the continuities and discontinuities of his philosophy with the original “Scotch school”, McCosh wrote:
I am represented as being of the Scottish school of philosophy. I adhere to it in one important principle: I believe that the truths of mental philosophy are to be discovered by a careful observation and induction of what passes in the mind. But in other respects I differ from the Scottish school. I profess to get my philosophy from the study of the human mind directly, and not from the teaching of others. The Scottish school maintains that we know only the qualities of things; I say we know the things themselves. So I call my philosophy Realism, and by help of a few obvious distinctions I hope to establish it. Hamilton makes our knowledge relative; I make it positive.
(McCosh, 1888: 29–30)
Like other Scottish philosophers teaching in different national contexts during the nineteenth century, McCosh’s reconstruction of “the Scottish philosophy” critically adapted Scottish common sense philosophy to the different circumstances in which he lived. In recovering the ways in which Scottish common (p.15) sense philosophy originally developed in response to the Ideal Theory during the long eighteenth century in Britain, this volume takes an important step toward a more complete understanding of “the Scottish philosophy” in the age of Enlightenment.
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