Scottish Philosophy and the First World War

Now overshadowed by the Scottish Enlightenment, it was the idealism of Edward Caird, Craig notes, which was the dominant philosophy of the Anglophone world on the eve of the First World War. The conflict, however, threatened to undermine Caird’s evolutionary conception of philosophy as an ever closer approach to the understanding of God’s presence. Scottish idealism survived the war – in the work of philosophers such as W. R. Sorley (the father of Charles Hamilton Sorley) – albeit maintaining itself in a world which had rejected the basis of idealist metaphysics.