Discover the story of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University Press – the first publications, the books that changed the field and what you can expect to see in future
At the beginning of the book What Is Philosophy? written by Gilles Deleuze in collaboration with Felix Guattari, the authors assert that “the time has come for us to ask what philosophy is”. They explicitly dismiss any hierarchy of the…
EMPIRICISM Adrian Johnston Before addressing Meillassoux’s positioning vis-à-vis empiricism proper as an epistemological orientation in philosophy, I should say a few words about his relations with things empirical, specifically as per the empirical sciences resting upon a posteriori observation and…
DELEUZE, GILLES Jeffrey Bell Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) is probably Meillassoux’s most important interlocutor, the philosopher who is both closest to his own concerns and yet the one with whom he most strongly disagrees. On the one hand, both Deleuze and…
CORRELATIONISM Written by Levi R. Bryant Meillassoux’s concept of correlation is arguably among his most significant and controversial contributions to philosophy. In After Finitude, he defines correlation as ‘the idea according to which we only ever have access to the…
By Gordon Graham For the Scottish philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries, Hume was the great ‘sceptic’ awaiting an answer, which many of them thought Thomas Reid had provided. Thanks to Norman Kemp Smith’s seminal papers, philosophers in the…
By Gordon Graham Scottish philosophy has regularly been identified with the ‘School of Common Sense’ because of the high regard in which Thomas Reid’s Inquiry was held in his lifetime and for many decades thereafter. Nevertheless, some major Scottish philosophers…
By Jean-Luc Nancy “As an opening, a quick overview: if our politics [la politique] is no longer simply and strictly that of sovereign states, then it is no longer ‘politics’ as we have known it for a very long time…
By Gordon Graham The tradition of Scottish philosophy had always had twin foci – the working of the human mind, and the social life of human beings. Some philosophical traditions hold these two areas of inquiry largely apart – Rationalism…
By Gordon Graham Philosophy played a key role in the curriculum of the Scottish universities from their foundation in the 15th century to the closing decade of the 19th century. By the middle of the 20th century, however, Hume’s great…