The Scotch Metaphysics: A Century of Enlightenment in Scotland (review)

Hume Studies Volume 28, Number 2, November 2002, pp. 314-318 GEORGE DAVIE. The Scotch Metaphysics: A Century of Enlightenment in Scotland . London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. xi + 241. ISBN 0415242657, cloth, $115.00. This is the first book in a series entitled Routledge Studies in NineteenthCentury Philosophy. Its author is well-known in studies of the Scottish Enlightenment; in fact, Davie could be called the dean of such studies. His previous books are The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century; The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect; and two volumes of essays on the Scottish Enlightenment. The text of the present book was written in 1953 but was never published until now and was awarded a D. Litt, degree at the University of Edinburgh, which helps explain some things about its style. The book's title, The Scotch Metaphysics, is a phrase "made by George III in the early days of the French Revolution in response to the attempt made by Dundas to overcome the King's scruples about signing the Catholic (one might say Irish) Emancipation Bill, which the government of William Pitt the younger wanted to pass into law" (7). Davie's use of the phrase refers to what he sees as a continuity of thought between the eighteenth-century quartet of Hutcheson, Hume, Reid, and Smith, and the quartet of nineteenth-century philosophers Stewart, Brown, Hamilton, and Ferrier. "The title serves also to mark off the debates of these eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Scottish philosophers," Davie adds, "from the debates engaged in by philosophers in England and Ireland" (8). The Scots, with the exception of Hume, practiced philosophy in an institutional setting, i.e., their universities , whereas the English and the Irish mostly practiced philosophy privately, outside the university setting. Consequently, the sense of continuity of thought and lively debate were intensified by the Scottish practice; most of these Scottish philosophers were either teachers or pupils of one another, friends and mentors who engaged in daily or weekly discussions. In spite of what Davie claims (193), the book is more about Reid and his reception than the other principals. Davie is preoccupied with the problems of traditional metaphysics: the problems of abstraction, the relation between sensation and perception, universals and particulars, and the external world. This is interesting because Davie wrote this book in the early fifties when the climate of philosophy was antimetaphysical and downright hostile to such traditional endeavors. In addition to Scottish philosophy, what was Davie familiar with? Apparently, with Hume Studies Book Reviews 315 both phenomenology (he mentions specific works of Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty in the introduction—drawing parallels with the Scottish philosophers ) and logical positivism. Davie's use of "phenomenological" in describing the arguments of especially Brown, Hamilton, and Ferrier (two chapters on them) sounds like he means "phenomenal." Davie doesn't mention any logical positivists, but he does mention H. H. Price and Gilbert RyIe in the acknowledgments. The technical language of logical positivism is present in Davie's interpretations of the philosophers he deals with. For instance , the term "sense data" is frequently employed without any indication of what it means. It probably comes from Price's Perception (1932) and A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (1936), and what they mean is this: what is immediately given to us through the senses (and this is probably Davie's sense of the term). In conjunction with this term, Davie uses "logical construction(s)"—sometimes in quotes, sometimes not. Perhaps most telling is the phrase "whiteness here now" (167), what Carnap and Ayer called "protocol statements," that were sentences immediately verifiable by experience or were simple unanalyzable ultimate expressions. All of this is pertinent, because Davie classifies Hamilton as a positivist when it comes to Hamilton discussing the discrepancy between the real shape and size of objects and the visible and the tangible shapes and sizes of objects. "Hamilton does not explain himself very much on this topic of shape and size at all," Davie writes, "but in so far as he [Hamilton] sets aside as frivolous the objection that common sense is deluded, because the visible size is not the same as...