AnAccount of the life and writings of Thomas Reid,
STEWART, (Dugald).
D.D. F.R.S.Edin. Late professor of moral philosophy in the University of Glasgow ... read at different meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
First Edition. 4to. [1], 164pp. Contemporary calf (a good copy).
Edinburgh: for Bell & Bradfute, by A. Neill and Co., 1803
Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) was "at the close of the eighteenth century ... the most influential philosopher active in Scotland" (Flynn, Enlightened Scotland). Stewart shared with both Reid and Hume a tendency to predict that the study of human nature would become an all-embracing science: Stewart admits the importance of Reid and Hume's contribution to the study of the human mind by analogy and experimental reasoning and is at the same time aware of the need for "general principles [of systematical analysis]... which alone can afford a synthetical explanation of [the human mind's] complicated phenomena" (Stewart).
In this work Stewart praises "Reid's Inquiry as a product of the genuine spirit of inductive study, the first systematic attempt to study human faculties according to the plan of investigation that Bacon had outlined in the Novum Organum and that Newton had followed with success in physics" (Flynn). The publication of Stewart's Account sparked a controversy with the philosopher-jurist Francis Jeffrey who contended, in an anonymous piece in the Edinburgh Review (of which Jeffrey was a founder), that all three philosophers deluded themselves somewhat in their analogies. Jeffrey was, however, as concerned with pragmatic philosophy as he was with moral.
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