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Berkeley's Impact on Scottish Philosophers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
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In 1728, when the sixteen-year-old Hume, still apparently ‘at college’, was beginning, all unknown to his family, to turn his attention to philosophy, Edinburgh and Glasgow were swarming with earnest metaphysicians, many of them not much older than Hume himself. ‘It is well known’, the Ochtertyre papers relate, ‘that between the years 1723 and 1740 nothing was in more request with the Edinburgh literati, both laical and clerical, than metaphysical disquisitions’, and Locke, Clarke, Butler and Berkeley are mentioned as the chief subjects for debate. Moreover, it is clear enough from the records that this surge of intellectual interests was chiefly the work of a younger generation, wearied alike of Calvinist theology and of Jacobite politics. Indeed to begin with it was the students’ societies which took the lead, and a plain enough hint of their serious critical attack is given in one sour entry in the diary of the Calvinist minister Woodrow for 1726. ‘These student clubs are like to have a very ill influence; they declare against reading and cry up thinking.’
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1965
References
page 222 note 1 See article on Wallace, in Scots Magazine, July 1771.Google Scholar
page 223 note 1 The list of Rankenian members in Woodhouselee's Life of Lord Kames contains besides the three names mentioned, also those of Smibert, Robert Wallace, Boswell's father, and two friends of Hume, Sir Alexander Dick and Sir Andrew Mitchell. In a letter to Hume in 1764, Dick speaks of their association with Mitchell as having happened a great while ago.
page 223 note 2 Turnbull's book was published by John, Noon, also responsible for the original volume of the Treatise of Human Nature. The two books are mentioned side by side in the publishers´ list on the end page of Vol. 2 of Turnbull's book.Google Scholar
page 223 note 3 p. xii. Vol. 1.
page 223 note 4 p. vi of the 1748 edition.
page 224 note 1 Loc. cit., p. 78.
page 224 note 2 Loc. cit., p. 19.
page 224 note 3 Loc. cit., p. 75.
page 224 note 4 p. iii, Vol. 1 of Turnbull.
page 225 note 1 p. 9, Vol. 1 of Turnbull.
page 225 note 2 p. 83 of MacLaurin.
page 225 note 3 See Vol. 1 of Turnbull, p. viii and pp. 3 and 4.Google Scholar
page 225 note 4 Vol. 1, p. 408.
page 225 note 5 Vol. 1, pp. 433 and 434.
page 226 note 1 Vol. 1, pp. 232 and 233. For completeness add also the longer reference in Vol. 2, pp. 22 and 23.
page 226 note 2 Vol. 1, p. 118.
page 226 note 3 Vol. 1, p. 16.
page 227 note 1 p. 99 of MacLaurin.
page 227 note 2 Also p. 99 of MacLaurin.
page 227 note 3 p. 98 of MacLaurin.
page 228 note 1 p.95 of MacLaurin.
page 228 note 2 Scots Magazine, loc. cit.
page 229 note 1 See The Nature of the Human Soul, Vol. 2 of the 1737 edition, in the long footnote pp. 294-297.Google Scholar
page 229 note 2 pp. 294 and 295 of the text of The Nature of the Human Soul.Google Scholar
page 229 note 3 See loc. cit.Google Scholar
page 229 note 4 This bound manuscript volume which is in Edinburgh University Library came from the Laing collection. I am indebted to Mr Finlayson, C. P., the Keeper of Manuscripts, for bringing it to my notice.Google Scholar
page 230 note 1 For the elucidation of the point at issue as it affected Hume and Reid, see my article in Revue Internationale de Philosophie, No. 20, from which some paragraphs have been transferred to the present article.Google Scholar
page 231 note 1 Baxter, , Vol. 2, p. 291.Google Scholar
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page 231 note 3 The complicated question of Reid's relation to Berkeley can be properly discussed only by someone who, in addition to studying both Berkeley and Reid, also studies their Cartesian predecessors and their Scottish successors, especially Fenier.Google ScholarSee Maxime Chastaing's sequence of five articles, three on the Cartesians (Rencontres 1949, Revue Philosopkique 1951,Google Scholaribid. 1953) followed by the BerkeleyGoogle Scholar (ibid. 1953) and culminating in the very remarkable Reid and the Philosophy of CommonSense (ibid. 1954).
page 233 note 1 pp. 105 and 106 of Vol. 10 of Stewart's works, edited Hamilton.Google Scholar
page 233 note 2 Loc. cit., p. xiv (footnote).
page 234 note 1 Loc. cit., p. 106.
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