Alexander Broadie (ed.), Scottish Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

Scottish Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century makes an outstanding contribution to the understanding of Scottish intellectual and cultural history. While significant research has been undertaken on philosophy in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in Scotland, relatively little has been done on seventeenth-century Scottish philosophy. Alexander Broadie’s edited volume addresses this lacuna through a series of original chapters, most of which are accessible to a reader who has a cursory knowledge of seventeenth-century Scottish history. The focus of the volume is on philosophy as an intellectual discipline and the book discusses its development in respect to logic, epistemology, ethics, faculty psychology, politics, and jurisprudence throughout the seventeenth century. This is achieved through both overviews of subject-matter and case-studies on the thought of individual thinkers. These chapters include both well-known figures, such as Samuel Rutherford, while also bringing to fore lesser known thinkers who ought to be engaged with, such as Mark Duncan, James Dalrymple, and William Chalmers. While the book’s emphasis upon abstract ideas may give the impression that its findings are largely irrelevant to the church historian, nothing could be further from the truth. As the opening chapters by David Allan and Steven Reid explain, the undergraduate degree that every minister, lawyer, and physician (and some noblemen) studied at university was that of philosophy. Thus the teaching of philosophy, a subject of study in the aforementioned chapters and those by Giovanni Gellera, Christian Maurer, and Thomas Ahnert and Martha McGill, shaped both the worldview which was preached from the pulpit on a Sunday morning and the thought-world of significant Scottish political figures, such as Archibald Campbell and James Graham. Simultaneously, the volume demonstrates how the upheavals caused by the Reformation, the Wars of Three Kingdoms, the restoration of the monarchy and the Williamite Revolution had an impact upon the education offered by Scottish universities, leading to changes both in the curriculum and who was allowed to teach it. The exploration of this dynamic interplay between the university, philosophical ideas, and the broader historical context is one of the stand-out features of this