| Popis: |
This chapter provides an overview of Scottish philosophy in the seventeenth century. Seventeenth-century Scotland produced a vibrant philosophical culture rich in achievement, with philosophers responsive to each other and responsive to philosophers of other countries. With regard to its philosophical culture, the century between the Age of Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment was an age in which there flourished the intellectual vigour that one might reasonably have expected given the philosophical achievements of the flanking centuries. Almost all the literature on Scottish philosophy attends exclusively to the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. This means that in providing a narrative that embraces philosophical writing antecedent to the Scottish Enlightenment, there is likely to be pressure to approach the subject in a teleological spirit, that is, by seeing the earlier century’s work in terms of the eighteenth century’s and attending to that earlier work on the basis of terms of reference dictated by what came later. |
