Most Famous Scottish Philosophers
Scottish philosophy is dominated by the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the most influential national philosophical tradition of its era. David Hume reshaped epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion; Adam Smith founded modern political economy and developed a sophisticated moral psychology in The Theory of Moral Sentiments; Adam Ferguson produced one of the first sociological treatments of civil society; Thomas Reid founded the common-sense school in opposition to Hume; Henry Home, Lord Kames was a major figure in Scottish historical jurisprudence. The nineteenth century continued the tradition with Thomas Carlyle and William Hamilton.
The Scottish tradition is distinguished by its close engagement with history, economics, and the empirical sciences, and by the social density of its philosophical milieu — the Edinburgh and Glasgow philosophers were friends, colleagues, and frequent correspondents. The thinkers below include the founders of empirical moral psychology, modern economics, and the common-sense school.
Scottish philosophers
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David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist of the Scottish Enlightenment. In A Treatise of Human Nature and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding he ad...
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Adam Smith
Adam Smith was an 18th-century Scottish moral philosopher and political economist, a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the founder of modern economics. His 1759 ...
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Adam Ferguson
Adam Ferguson was an 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and historian, often regarded as one of the founders of modern sociology. His 1767 work An Essay on the Hist...
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Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher and one of the most prominent Victorian moral voices. After early labors as the introducer of German Romantic ...
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Edward Caird
Edward Caird was a Scottish Hegelian philosopher, long-time professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, and from 1893 master of Balliol College, Oxford, in succession to Benjamin ...
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Henry Home, Lord Kames
Henry Home, Lord Kames, was a Scottish judge, philosopher, and polymath and one of the central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. From his seat on the Court of Session he ca...
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John Caird
John Caird was a Scottish theologian, philosopher of religion, and Church of Scotland minister, elder brother of Edward Caird, and from 1873 principal of the University of Glasg...
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Thomas Reid
Thomas Reid was a Scottish philosopher and the founder of the Scottish school of Common Sense. He developed his philosophy in critical reaction to the empiricist tradition of Lo...
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William Hamilton
Sir William Hamilton, ninth Baronet of Preston, was a Scottish philosopher and the leading British philosophical figure of the mid nineteenth century. Professor of logic and met...
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Duns Scotus
John Duns Scotus was a 13th and early 14th-century Scottish Franciscan friar, philosopher, and theologian, regarded as one of the most important medieval scholastic philosophers...
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Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison
Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison was a Scottish philosopher and one of the leading critics of absolute idealism within British Idealism itself. After studies at Edinburgh and in Ger...
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Mary Shepherd
Lady Mary Shepherd was a Scottish philosopher and one of the most acute British metaphysicians of the early nineteenth century. The daughter of an Earl, she received an extensiv...