Scottish Philosophy After the Enlightenment

Beginning with Sir William Hamilton’s revitalisation of philosophy in Scotland in the 1830s, Gordon Graham takes up the theme of George Davie’s The Democratic Intellect and explores a century of debates surrounding the identity and continuity of the Scottish philosophical tradition. Graham identifies a host of once-prominent but now neglected thinkers - such as Alexander Bain, J. F. Ferrier, Thomas Carlyle, Alexander Campbell Fraser, John Tulloch, Henry Jones, Henry Calderwood, David Ritchie and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison - whose reactions to Hume and Reid stimulated new currents of ideas. He concludes by considering the relation between the Scottish philosophical tradition and the 20th-century philosopher John Macmurray.

Gordon Graham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and the Arts at Princeton Theological Seminary, USA and is Director of Edinburgh Sacred Art Foundation. He is the author of over 13 books and multiple journal articles. His most recent publications include Philosophy, Art and Religion: Understanding Faith and Creativity (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Scottish Philosophy in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Oxford University Press, 2015). He was editor of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy for many years.He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh since 1999.