Craig Cairns

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world.

This chapter begins with the intellectual formation of John Stuart Mill, friend and mentor of Alexander Bain (1818–1903). It presents the case for thinking that, despite his lifelong residence in England, Mill is properly regarded as an inheritor of one important strand in the Scottish philosophical tradition, namely the positivistic naturalism of David Hume. Mill valued Bain’s comments on his System of Logic, and the high regard he placed on Bain’s early psychological work, led him to play a key part in Bain’s appointment to the Chair of Logic in the amalgamated University of Aberdeen (1860), despite strenuous opposition. This chapter explores Bain’s seminal contributions to the foundation of physiologically based psychology, as well as his founding of the subsequently internally acclaimed journal Mind. The chapter interprets Bain as the principal mature exponent of an alternative non-Reidian, non-metaphysical version of the ‘science of mind’.

The history of Scottish philosophy in the nineteenth century is written by migrant philosophers attempting to use the Scottish tradition as the foundation for philosophy in their new homelands. In the accounts of John Clark Murray, James McCosh and Henry Laurie, different evaluations are made of the continuing relevance of the Scottish Common Sense School, but all are committed Christians for whom David Hume cannot be part of a Scottish tradition. As a result, none of these accounts gives any suggestion of there having been a ‘Scottish Enlightenment’. That concept was only made possible by the radical reinterpretation of Hume by Norman Kemp Smith, which linked his philosophy to Hutcheson and dismissed his opposition to Reid. The subsequent emergence of ‘the Scottish Enlightenment’ eclipsed nineteenth-century Scottish ‘idealism’, shaped by Edward Caird, which Murray, Laurie and Kemp Smith had regarded as the foundation of their own philosophies.

Cet article met en évidence la grande difficulté que pose la communication poétique, surtout à partir de Coleridge, pour la théorie empiriste de Vassociation des idées, fondée sur les présupposés hérités de la tradition de Locke et de Hartley. De l'époque de Coleridge au début du xixe siècle, jusqu'à celle d'I. A. Richards et de T. S. Eliot, un siècle plus tard, c'est cette difficulté qui a suscité un débat important parmi les poètes et critiques littéraires britanniques : la discussion autour de la possibilité de la communication d'un sens poétique, tel qu'il émerge du génie du poète, à un lecteur qui n'est pas doté de la même force créatrice, et dont les idées prennent nécessairement naissance dans d'autres processus associatifs. Selon l'argument adopté ici, cette difficulté conduit à une crise de l'interprétation qui trouve une possible issue dans les conceptions de la mémoire collective chez Eliot et Richards. Par l'idée d'une mémoire collective, chacun de ces auteurs tente de rendre compte non seulement de la persistance de certaines idées, mais de la transmission du principe de leur enchaînement. En reformulant ainsi les théories empiristes antérieures de l'association des idées à la lumière du phénomène de la mémoire collective, ces auteurs tentent de comprendre la possibilité de la communicabilité poétique en dépit de l'écart qui, selon eux, sépare le poète de son lecteur. This article examines the difficulty that poetic communication poses, above all after Coleridge, for the theory of the association of ideas founded on presuppositions inherited from the tradition of Locke and Hartley. From the period of Coleridge at the beginning of the 19th century until that of I. A. Richards and of T. S. Eliot a century later, this difficulty fueled an important debate among British poets and literary critics: the discussion concerning the possibility of communicating poetic meaning, evisioned by the unique mind of the poet, to a reader who is not endowed wih the same creative capacity, and whose ideas necessarily arise from different associative processes. According to the argument adopted here, this difficulty led to a crisis of interpretation which found a possible resolution in the conceptions of collective memory adopted by Eliot and Richards. By means of the idea of a collective memory, each of these authors attempted to account not only for the persistence of certain ideas, but for the transmission of the principle of their interrelation. By thus reformulating earlier empiricist ideas of association in light of collective memory, these authors attempted to understand the possibility of poetic communication in spite of the distance which, for them, stands between poet and reader.