In David Hume’s lifetime, Aberdeen was the place where his Treatise of Human Nature left the deepest mark. Elsewhere it was largely unread even by those who pretended they were responding to it. In Aberdeen, a self-selecting group of philosophers meeting fortnightly – the ‘Wise Club’, as it has become known, established in 1758 – took it seriously enough to make Hume their chief defendant and accused, bringing his arguments before their bar, as Thomas Reid wrote, ‘oftener than any other man’ (10). Gordon Graham’s new book asks whether this sustained critical engagement yielded insights and arguments of enduring philosophical value or, due to their significance in their own time and place, they are more worthy of the attention of intellectual historians than philosophers. Graham endorses and elaborates the former view with clarity and economy across six chapters devoted to the Wise Club’s intellectual context, to Reid and Beattie as critics of Hume’s moral philosophy and epistemology, to George Campbell on rhetoric and miracles, to Alexander Gerard on taste and genius, and to the question of what ultimately divided Hume from his Aberdeen interlocutors and made him more central to the philosophical scence as we know it today.
The book intends to make a historiographical intervention by challenging the tacit assumption that canonical survival reliably tracks philosophical merit. Graham has two intertwined aims: to reconstruct the philosophical substance of the Aberdonians’ responses to Hume, and to reconsider their subsequent marginalisation. As Graham’s sympathetic reconstruction suggests, this situation is unfair and unfortunate: we commit epistemic injustice and lose much philosophical value if we ignore the contribution of the Aberdonians. Graham’s response to this state of affairs takes shape through a series of paired readings. In each chapter he reconstructs Hume’s position on a given topic, then examines how the relevant Aberdonian engages with it, and asks whether the engagement produces anything of genuine philosophical interest.
The most rewarding chapters are on Campbell and Gerard. The discussion of Campbell’s Dissertation on Miracles rehabilitates the book as a philosophically rigorous critique of Hume’s essay ‘Of Miracles’. Graham argues that Campbell’s most important achievement consists in exposing Hume as a rhetorician disguised in the cloak of a philosopher. Campbell points out in Hume’s argument a systematic ambiguity between the phrases ‘contrary to experience’ and ‘not conformable to experience’ which, once exposed, reveals Hume’s essay as something closer to persuasive oratory than philosophical argumentation. Graham rightly insists that Campbell’s arguments retain independent epistemological interest once detached from their theological aims.
The chapter on Gerard’s twin essays on taste and genius makes a compelling case that Gerard’s distinction between taste as immediate sensation and taste as reflective discernment resolves a genuine instability in Hume’s account of the standard of taste – one that Hume leaves unaddressed because, as Graham shows, he had nothing to say about genius and therefore could not explain the connection between artistic creativity and aesthetic appreciation that Gerard’s account neatly handles. Graham highlights the similarities between Hume and Gerard – both appeal to cultivated sensibility and refined judgment – but emphasises Gerard’s effort to preserve a stronger role for normative standards. Hume’s account of the ‘true judge’ relies on an idealised model of perceptual convergence; Gerard seeks to articulate more explicit criteria grounded in the faculties of imagination and reason. The philosophical divergence boils down to whether aesthetic normativity can be fully naturalised. Gerard hesitates to allow aesthetic evaluation to reduce to psychological regularities, whereas Hume appears more willing to ground standards in shared human sentiment.
Throughout the chapters, Graham aspires to revise the less than favourable verdicts that subsequent scholarship and fellow philosophers passed on the Aberdonians. This effort is strongly present in the chapter on Beattie. The section on Beattie’s demolition of Hume’s infamous footnote to ‘Of National Characters’ on the inferiority of people of colour can easily convince the reader about Hume’s inconsistency on the universality of human nature and that Beattie’s response is closely reasoned and empirically more rigorous than Hume’s disturbing remark. Graham also defends An Essay on Truth as a work of ‘common sense philosophy’ with philosophical credentials. As he points out, there is indeed philosophical force in several of Beattie’s objections to Hume with respect to the impression/idea distinction or the tenability of vivacity as the sole mark of the mental significance of a perception. But the reader may leave with doubts as to the tenability of Beattie’s common sense framework for the purposes of disinterested inquiry or its conformity with frequently counterintuitive modern science.
The chapter on Reid may break the most familiar ground, given the critical attention Reid receives in contemporary philosophical discourse. Graham examines here what Reid has to say specifically about Hume’s moral philosophy and to argue that Reid’s criticism retains force even against the ‘New Hume’ reading (associated with Norman Kemp Smith, John Wright, and Galen Strawson). His argument is that even if the ‘New Hume’ is not a moral sceptic, Reid’s complaint still identifies something relevant: that Hume’s moral psychology finds only causal mechanisms behind moral evaluation while a proper account requires moral judgment in a robustly reflective sense. Whereas Hume explains the genesis of moral sentiments in terms of associative mechanisms and vivacity transfer, Reid insists on the rational dimensions of judgment. According to Reid, Hume mischaracterises the structure of cognition in general by treating inferential connections as psychological sequences, by taking ‘rational relationships for causal psychological processes’ (57). Hume’s mechanical account of how beliefs are formed naturally cannot account for their epistemological status – which is essential to the nature of belief.
This insight drives Graham’s broader claim that the most profound difference between Hume and his critics is not about scepticism or religion but the very nature of the philosophical enterprise. This brings us to the book’s perceptive claim, advanced in the concluding chapter: that the real gulf between Hume and the Aberdonians is the gulf between a purely descriptive-explanatory science of mind and a normative one. Hume’s project in the Treatise is, as Graham puts it, Newtonian – it aims to uncover the causal principles by which beliefs are formed and behaviour motivated, treating human beings as objects of scientific investigation no different in kind from other natural phenomena. Graham considers, by contrast, the Aberdonian philosophers broadly Aristotelian whose science of human nature is in the service of normative inquiry. Campbell wants to know not only what moves people but what ought to move them; Gerard investigates taste not to describe what pleases but to establish what ought to please; Beattie’s Essay on Truth is directed not at a scepticism that is merely intellectually mistaken but at one that, absorbed unreflectively, licenses moral nihilism.
One might wonder if the opposition is best characterised in terms of Newtonianism and Aristotelianism in the present context. The Aberdonians adhered, in varying forms and interpretations, to the experimental method of reasoning as had been outlined by Newton in his ‘Rules for the Study of Natural Philosophy’. Their central disagreement with Hume was not about accepting Newton’s rules but, as Graham makes us see it correctly, about the scope and limits of naturalistic explanation. At the very end of the book, Graham explores the contrast beween ‘providential naturalism’ and ‘naturalism’ simpliciter (for the sake of an apt contrast, it could be called ‘agnostic naturalism’) that might do better service here (166–171). Both naturalisms can be accommodated on the Newtonian globe. Aberdonians, just like Newton, think of natural order as underwritten by divine will, and the regularities Hume treats as brute contingent facts are, for them, expressions of God’s intentions and therefore potentially normative and teleological in themselves. But Newton’s rules can be deployed without any such theological frame of reference, in a purely descriptive-explanatory manner – as has been arguably attempted not just by Hume but also by Adam Smith, John Millar, as well as William Cullen, and Joseph Black. This divergence explains why the Aberdonians were so consistent in thinking that Hume’s insights were not the discoveries he thought them to be but symptoms of having adopted the wrong model of what philosophy is for.
The philosophical significance of the protagonists ultimately depends on whether this oppostion is still alive. I am inclined to agree with Graham’s affirmative answer and his diagnosis that the marginalisation of Campbell, Gerard, and Beattie is not primarily the result of inferior argumentation, but of subsequent intellectual developments that favoured Hume’s brand of naturalism. Their eclipse thus reflects conceptual realignment rather than refutation. One comes away persuaded that Campbell and Gerard in particular deserve serious philosophical attention – not as precursors of contemporary positions, which they are not, but as thinkers who identified limitations in the Humean programme and responded to it with genuine sophistication. For readers interested in the methodological stakes of eighteenth-century philosophy – particularly the relationship between explanation, normativity, and religious commitment – the book offers both detailed scholarship and substantive reflection.
Graham writes with lucidity, his comparative method is well executed, and the historical contextualisation is economical without being superficial. The book succeeds in showing that the Aberdonian philosophers were more serious participants in debates of enduring philosophical significance than they are usually represented. By reconstructing their arguments with care and charity, Graham invites renewed engagement with positions that shaped the early reception of Hume but have since faded from view. It does not overturn the canonical standing of Hume, nor does it artificially elevate his critics. Instead, it complicates the familiar narrative, reminding us that the philosophical landscape of the Enlightenment was more contested than retrospective accounts often suggest. Whether that is enough to secure the philosophical rehabilitation Graham seeks for his heroes is a question each reader will have to answer for themselves; but the case has not before been put with such precision and economy.
