Description:
Highlights the continued flourishing of Scottish philosophy after the Enlightenment by exploring the work of underappreciated figures (such as Alexander Bain, J. F. Ferrier, Thomas Carlyle and John Macmurray) and debates (such as realism vs idealism; metaphysics vs psychology; evolution vs religion; and theism vs agnosticism).
Brief description: Gordon Graham is Director of the Edinburgh Sacred Arts Festival. He previously taught philosophy at the University of St Andrews, University of Aberdeen, and Princeton Theological Seminary. The author of twenty books on a wide range of subjects in aesthetics, politics and moral philosophy, he has also published extensively on the Scottish philosophical tradition. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and winner of an Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society Lifetime Achievement Award, he was founding editor of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy and general editor of the Oxford History of Scottish Philosophy. His books include Scottish Philosophy after the Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
Review Quotes:
In every respect this book is a far more careful consideration of Scottish Philosophy after the Enlightenment than its forerunners. James McCosh, Henry Laurie, and George Davie all sketched versions of the history of this period, but none of them really focussed on the ideas in as clear-eyed a fashion as Gordon Graham.
--Craig Smith "British Journal of the History of Philosophy"