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The Absence of God and Its Contextual Significance for Hume

In our featured article this week, “The Absence of God and Its Contextual Significance for Hume”, David Fergusson of the University of Edinburgh sets Hume’s thoroughgoing religious scepticism within the context of the Scottish Enlightenment. Much of Hume scholarship today…

Empiricism – An Extract from The Meillassoux Dictionary

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…

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…