• Photograph showing a page from a medieval manuscript.

Realism and Scepticism

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…

Common Sense and Moral Philosophy

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…

OLR

The Political and/or Politics

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…

Scottish Philosophy: Mind and Society

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…

Scottish Philosophy: Neglect and Renewal

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…

Gordon Graham

Scottish Philosophy: Project and Legacy

By Gordon Graham The Scottish philosophical tradition found its richest and most influential expression in the investigations Scottish philosophers of the 18th century conducted in their project of a ‘science of human nature’. This project, uniquely, tackled traditional philosophical problems…