Giovanni Gellera

The Reformation influenced most aspects of Scottish culture, including philosophy. The Scottish regents produced an original synthesis of scholastic philosophy (especially Scotism) and Reformed views. The synthesis is centred on the relevance of the doctrine of the Fall in epistemology, a ‘Calvinist’ division of science (chiefly, of theology from philosophy), and a reductionist (meta)physics of the Eucharist developed against transubstantiation. Scottish Reformed philosophy was influential abroad via the intellectual network of the Scots working in the Protestant Academies in France, until the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), and in the universities in the United Provinces. The history of Scottish Reformed scholastic philosophy is about its place within the European Reformation, late scholasticism, and the arrival of the ‘new’ philosophies.

For a seventeenth-century Scottish regent, logic was preliminary to all other disciplines and secondary only to Latin. Logic was the trait-d’union between natural language (Latin, grammar, classical literature, the Bible) and the technical philosophical jargon. Logic was also important for theology and apologetics. Until the 1650s, logic is scholastic, centred on the trivium of logic, rhetoric, and grammar. The influence of Humanism, especially Ramism, is visible in the importance of induction, the treatment of method as a branch of logic, the orientation of logic towards practical tasks. Later in the century, alongside Aristotle, the key figures are René Descartes and Francis Bacon. The ‘old’ Aristotelian logic is made compatible with the ‘new’ method for the acquisition of new truths developed from Cartesian and Baconian insights. The reception of Descartes and Bacon has a common root in scholastic empiricism.

In the nineteenth century James McCosh and many others identified the Common Sense school with “Scottish philosophy” tout court: the supposedly collective “Scottish” reply to Hume was the rejection of skepticism and Ideal Theory. This chapter addresses the anticipations of the Common Sense school and its broader place in the history of Scottish philosophy. The seventeenth-century Scottish philosophers reacted to Cartesian skepticism with epistemological views which anticipate Thomas Reid: direct realism and perception as a faculty of judgment. Common sense-like views seem to have been a popular strategy against skepticism already before the Common Sense school, thus providing additional evidence for McCosh’s claim of the special role of common sense in the history of Scottish philosophy.

This article is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Contexts of Religious Tolerance: New Perspectives from Early Modern Britain and Beyond’, which contains essays on the contributions to the debates on tolerance by non-canonical philosophers and theologians, mainly from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scotland and England. Among the studied authors are the Aberdeen Doctors, Samuel Rutherford, James Dundas, John Finch, George Keith, John Simson, Archibald Campbell, Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull and John Witherspoon. The introduction draws attention to several methodological points connected to the decision to look at the debates on tolerance through the prism of rarely studied authors. It then presents the essays, which offer novel perspectives by analysing and contextualising political, religious and moral treatments of tolerance. These are tied especially to debates on the articles of faith and on their status, on confessions of faith and their role in the quest for orthodoxy, on liberty of conscience, and on the relation between church and state.

In the manuscript Idea philosophiae moralis, James Dundas, first Lord Arniston, a Presbyterian, a judge and a philosopher, makes extensive use of Stoic themes and authors. About one third of the manuscript is a close reading of Seneca. Dundas judges Stoicism from the perspective of Calvinism: the decisive complaint is that the Stoics are ‘prideful’ when they consider happiness to be within the grasp of fallen human reason. However, pride aside, Dundas is willing to recover some Stoic insights for his Calvinist faith. In what ways? The promise of the practical rewards of Stoicism drives Dundas's interest in arguing that Stoicism can play a crucial psychological and moral contribution to a Christian's life. The investigation of Stoicism in the Idea philosophiae moralis sheds new light on the backdrop of the Scottish Enlightenment's relationship with Stoicism, commonly characterised as ‘Christian Stoicism’, as well as on the variety of the early modern Christian-Stoic syntheses, such as the Religio Stoici by George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, a friend of Dundas's.

In the Dutch debates on Cartesianism of the 1640s, a minority believed that some Cartesian views were in fact Calvinist ones. The paper argues that, among others, a likely precursor of this position is the Aristotelian Franco Burgersdijk (1590-1635), who held a reductionist view of accidents and of the essential extension of matter on Calvinist grounds. It seems unlikely that Descartes was unaware of these views. The claim is that Descartes had two aims in his Replies to Arnauld: to show the compatibility of res extensa and the Catholic transubstantiation but also to differentiate the res extensa from some views of matter explicitly defended by some Calvinists. The association with Calvinism will be eventually used polemically against Cartesianism, for example in France. The paper finally suggests that, notwithstanding the points of conflict, the affinities between the theologically relevant theories of accidents, matter and extension ultimately facilitated the dissemination of Cartesianism among the Calvinists.

This paper investigates the little-known reception of Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and John Locke in the Scottish universities in the period 1660–1700. The fortune of the English philosophers in the Scottish universities rested on whether their philosophies were consonant with the Scots’ own philosophical agenda. Within the established Cartesian curriculum, the Scottish regents eagerly taught what they thought best in English philosophy and criticised what they thought wrong. The paper also suggests new sources and perspectives for the broader discussion of the ‘origins’ of the Scottish Enlightenment.

This paper wishes to make a contribution to the study of how seventeenth-century scholasticism adapted to the new intellectual challenges presented by the Reformation. I focus in particular on the theory of accidents, which Reformed scholastic philosophers explored in search of a philosophical understanding of the rejection of the Catholic and Lutheran interpretations of the Eucharist. I argue that the Calvinist scholastics chose the view that actual inherence is part of the essence of accidents because it was coherent with their theology. In this paper, I bring to attention the Reformed scholastic philosophy which was taught in the Scottish universities in the first half of the seventeenth century, an area so far neglected by scholars. In so doing, I compare Scottish scholasticism with coeval Calvinist sources, and highlight the differences from authoritative Catholic and Lutheran philosophers. The conclusion is that Calvinist scholasticism, both Scottish and Continental, brought about fundamental changes in seventeenth-century metaphysics, which are coherent with a humanist interpretation of Aristotle, and anticipate some themes of early modern philosophy

In 1685, during the heyday of Scottish Cartesianism, regent Robert Lidderdale from Edinburgh University declared Cartesianism the best philosophy in support of the Reformed faith. It is commonplace that Descartes was ostracised by the Reformed, and his role in pre-Enlightenment Scottish philosophy is not yet fully acknowledged. This paper offers an introduction to Scottish Cartesianism, and argues that the philosophers of the Scottish universities warmed up to Cartesianism because they saw it as a newer, better version of their own traditional Reformed scholasticism, chiefly in metaphysics and natural philosophy

This paper investigates aspects of the philosophy curriculum that Thomas Reid studied during his student years in Aberdeen. In order to assess the nature of philosophy teaching in early eighteenth-century Aberdeen, the graduation theses of the Scottish universities must be read with an eye to the long tradition of university teaching, which reaches back into the seventeenth century. I will seek to show how seventeenth-century Scottish Reformed scholasticism is the backdrop of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The graduation theses of the Scottish universities in the first half of the seventeenth century are at the crossroads of philosophical and historical events of fundamental importance: Renaissance and Humanist philosophy, Scholastic and modern philosophy, Reformation and Counterreformation, the rise of modern science. The struggle among these tendencies shaped the culture of the seventeenth century. Graduation theses are a product of the Scholasticism of the modern age, which survived the Reformation in Scotland and decisively influenced Scottish philosophy in the seventeenth century, including the reception of early modern philosophy. We can therefore speak of a ‘Scottish Scholasticism’, characterised by an original reception and interpretation of the long traditions of Scholastic philosophy and Aristotelianism. The aim of the thesis is the analysis of the general physics of the graduation theses: the two central theories are prime matter and movement. Natural philosophy is a particularly interesting case, and the main features of the graduation theses are the reception of Scholasticism alongside innovation within Scholasticism. Graduation theses adhere to the Scholastic tradition, especially Scotism, while being innovative in their opposition to Catholic forms of Scholasticism. Scottish Scholasticism can be then further qualified as an example of ‘Reformed Scholasticism’