I

Chapter 10 concluded with the claim that Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison brought the Scottish philosophical tradition to a close. This contention is not universally accepted. Though there has been little discussion of the issue, a few commentators have extended the tradition considerably past this point by identifying John Macmurray (1891–1976) as a representative of Scottish philosophy. All the philosophers considered in previous chapters, even those who lived into the twentieth century, were essentially products of nineteenth-century Scotland. Macmurray, by contrast, was a philosopher of the twentieth century. What he does have in common with, for example, Hamilton, Bain, Ferrier and Caird is the fact that, having been acclaimed in his own time, his copious publications have been remarkably neglected by both contemporary philosophical discussion and the history of philosophy. Accordingly, this final chapter has a twofold purpose. First, in light of the conclusion of the previous chapter, it will aim to identify Macmurray’s relation to the Scottish philosophical tradition. Second, in the course of doing so, it will try to recover something of his significance as a thinker.

According to Alexander Broadie in A History of Scottish Philosophy, it is a mistake to confuse the Scottish philosophical tradition with the ‘Scottish School of Common Sense’.