British philosophy

British philosophy refers to the philosophical tradition of people both within Great Britain and its citizens abroad.

David Hume, a profoundly influential Scottish philosopher.

Medieval period

Duns Scotus

John Duns Scotus (c. 1265 – November 8, 1308) was an important philosophy and theologian of the High Middle Ages. Scotus was born around 1265, at Duns, in Berwickshire, Scotland. In 1291 he was ordained as a priest in Northampton, England. A note in Codex 66 of Merton College, Oxford, records that Scotus "flourished at Cambridge, Oxford and Paris". He died in Cologne in 1308 He is buried in the "Minoritenkirche", the Church of the Franciscans (or Minor Friars) in Cologne. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on March 20, 1993.

Nicknamed Doctor Subtilis (the subtle doctor), he is well-known for the "univocity of being," the formal distinction, and the idea of haecceity. The univocity of being holds that existence is the most abstract concept we have and is applicable to everything that exists. The formal distinction is a way of distinguishing between different aspects of the same thing such that the distinction is intermediate between what is merely conceptual, and what is fully real or mind-independent. Haecceity (from the Latin haecceitas) is the idea of "thisness," a concept which denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing.

William of Ockham

William of Ockham (c. 1288 - c. 1348) was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher. He is perhaps most well-known for his principle of parsimony, famously known as Occam's razor. It says that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem). This is taken to mean that the simplest idea or theory is usually the correct one.

Early modern period

The three classic British empiricists

The 'classic' trio of British empiricists in the early modern era were John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. The term "British empiricism" refers to the philosophical tradition in Britain that was epitomised by these thinkers (though this tradition did have precursors in Britain streching back to Roger Bacon).

John Locke

John Locke

John Locke (1632-1704) was an empiricist at the beginning of the Modern period of philosophy. As such (and in contrast to René Descartes), he held that all of the objects of the understanding are ideas, where ideas exist in the mind. One of his goals in his work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is to trace the origin of ideas. There are no innate ideas “stamped upon the mind” from birth, and all knowledge is rooted in experience. Further, there are also simple ideas and complex ideas. Simple ideas enter by the senses, and they are simple and unmixed. Complex ideas are simple ideas that have been combined and related together using the abstracting activity of the mind.

Locke is also responsible for an early theory of personal identity. He though that our being the same person from one time to another consists, not in our having the same soul, nor the same body, but rather the same series of psychological connections. For Locke, to be a person is to be an intelligent thinking being that can know itself as itself the same thinking thing in different times and places.

George Berkeley

Bishop George Berkeley (1685 - 1753) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher. He was an empiricist, an immaterialist, and an idealist. Many of his most important ideas were first put forth in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, a work which was critical of John Locke's philosophy. Berkeley agreed with Locke that there was an outside world which caused the ideas within the mind, but Berkeley sought to prove that the outside world was also composed solely of ideas. Berkeley though that the ideas that we possessed could only resemble other ideas (not physical objects) and thus the external world consisted not of physical form, but rather of ideas. This world was given logic and regularity by some other force, which Berkeley concluded was God.

Berkeley is famous for his motto "esse est percipere", or otherwise, "to exist is to be perceived, or to be a perceiver". This means that there are no things other than ideas and the minds that house them. There is no such thing as a mind-independent entity.

David Hume

See also: Scottish Enlightenment

David Hume (1711 – 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian. His major works, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), the An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) remain widely influential. His ideas regarding free will and determinism, causation, personal identity, induction, and morality still inspire discussion.

Hume famously described the problem of induction. He argues that inductive reasoning cannot be rationally employed, since, in order to justify induction, one would either have to provide a sound deductive argument or an inductively strong argument. But there is no sound deductive argument for induction, and to ask for an inductive argument to justify induction would be to beg the question.

Hume's problem of causation is related to his problem of induction. He held that there is no empirical access to the supposed necessary connection between cause and effect. In seeking to justify the belief that A causes B, one would point out that, in the past, B has always closely followed A in both space and time. But the special necessary connection that is supposed to be causation is never given to us in experience. We only observe a constant conjunction of events, with no necessity whatsoever.

In personal identity, Hume was a bundle theorist. He said that there is no robust self to which properties adhere. Experience only shows us that there is only a bundle of perceptions.

Adam Smith

Adam Smith (1723– 1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economics. Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics.

Smith studied moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford. After graduating, he delivered a successful series of public lectures at Edinburgh, leading him to collaborate with David Hume during the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow teaching moral philosophy, and during this time he wrote and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Later modern period and beyond

British idealism

As an area of absolute idealism, British idealism was a philosophical movement that was influential in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Important representitives included T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, J. M. E. McTaggart, H. H. Joachim, J. H. Muirhead, and G. R. G. Mure. Two British philosophers, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, were brought up in this tradition and then reacted against it by pioneering analytic philosophy.

Analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy was based on traditional British empiricism, updated to accommodate the new developments in logic pioneered by German mathematician Gottlob Frege. It has dominated philosophy in the English-speaking world since the early 20th century.

G.E. Moore

File:Bertrand Russell 1950.jpg

Bertrand Russell in 1950.

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) led the British "revolt against idealism" in the early 1900s, along with G.E. Moore. He was influenced by Gottlob Frege, and was the mentor of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. He co-authored, with Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, an attempt to derive all mathematical truths from a set of axioms using rules of inference in symbolic logic. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy." Both works have had a considerable influence on logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics, and philosophy.

Russell's theory of descriptions has been profoundly influential in the philosophy of language and the analysis of definite descriptions. His theory was first developed in his 1905 paper "On Denoting".

Contemporary times

British philosophers particularly active in the philosophy of religion include Antony Flew, C. S. Lewis, and John Hick.

Important moral and political philosophers include R.M. Hare and Alasdair MacIntyre.

Derek Parfit, Karl Popper, Colin McGinn, Galen Strawson, and his father P. F. Strawson also all work in the analytic tradition, focusing on such fields as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, logic, and the philosophy of language.

See also

• List of British philosophers
• British Philosophical Association
• The Philosophical Society of England

External links

• The British Philosophical Association