Stewart and Hamilton

How did the cause of common sense realism fare in Scotland in the decades immediately following Thomas Reid’s death in 1796? This chapter explores the contributions of the two Edinburgh-based philosophers introduced at the end of Chapter 1: Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) and Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856). Stewart’s approach to the problem of the external world is less intellectually adventurous than what we find in Hamilton, who attempted something difficult and hitherto untried—namely, to arrive at a synthesis of the insights of Reid and Kant. Hamilton’s willingness to learn from Kant and the post-Kantian idealists opened up Scottish philosophy to foreign authors and fresh influences, and this contributed to the backlash against common sense realism which is the subject of Chapters 5 and 6.