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The Wise Club reconstructs the collaborative intellectual culture in which the Scottish philosophy of common sense first emerged in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society between 1758 and 1773. Rather than attributing this school of thought to a single founder, the study traces how David Skene, John Gregory, Thomas Reid, George Campbell, Alexander Gerard, and James Beattie developed distinct yet compatible inquiries across different branches of knowledge through a disciplined culture of inquiry. Their collective commitment to an inductive investigation of the original faculties of the human mind extended common sense beyond epistemology to natural history, medicine, rhetoric, aesthetics, moral philosophy, and imaginative literature. Drawing on unpublished discourses, abstracted discussions, lecture notes, and correspondence, this Element situates the Wise Club in a formative context that produced canonical works of the Scottish Enlightenment and reinterprets common sense philosophy as a characteristic method of inquiry rather than a unified doctrinal system.
Locke’s skeptical semiotics suggested that language could never grasp reality, but Reidian Common Sense philosophers insisted we could know the world directly and intuitively. Dickinson’s poems engage Common Sense theories which seem to discount the role of language in forming our perceptions. In her poetry, she works through and plays with Common Sense ideas about language, perception, and knowing, testing them against skeptical associationist ideas she found congenial to her work as a poet. In fact, Dickinson’s Upham textbook struggles to fend off the skeptical consequences of Brown’s Humean associationism as it undoes the Reidian realism in the perceptual process. In the course of reading several poems, I show that Dickinson’s poems work out the idea that language presents to us the only world we can know. Dickinson’s epistemological thinking works out a poetics content with “terms” and uncertainty, since the mediations of language produce and nurture human community.
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