Common Sense and Ideal Theory in Seventeenth-Century Scottish Philosophy

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.