I

The question of Hume’s relationship to Scottish philosophy is somewhat problematic. The term ‘Scottish philosophy’, of course, did not gain much currency until 1875, almost a century after Hume’s death, when James McCosh published The Scottish Philosophy. McCosh included Hume in his list of forty-nine Scottish philosophers, giving him the longest chapter in fact, because, interestingly, he thought the content of Hume’s Treatise was not widely enough known. Yet he makes it clear that Hume, to whom he refers as ‘the Scotch sceptic’, is not to be regarded as belonging to ‘the Scottish philosophy’. Rather, ‘it has been the aim of the Scottish school, as modified and developed by Reid, to throw back the scepticism of Hume’ (McCosh 1875: 158). Hume’s role, in other words, is as a stimulus, not a contributor, to ‘the Scottish School’. Ten years later Andrew Seth gave expression to the same idea when he subtitled his Balfour Lectures on Scottish Philosophy ‘A Comparison of the Scottish and German Answers to Hume’. This formulation clearly excludes Hume from the Scottish School, whose principal architect Seth took to be Reid.

Hume’s Treatise preceded Reid’s Inquiry by about twenty-five years, but it is plain that McCosh and Seth did not think of Scottish philosophy as a development that built upon Hume’s Treatise. It was, rather, a reaction to it. This is indeed how, since the late eighteenth century, many people have seen Hume’s relationship to Scottish philosophy, and there is evidently considerable plausibility to the view. Yet there are also important considerations to be brought against it. To begin with, while a key feature characterising Scottish philosophy is the assertion of a radical division between Reid and Hume, that is not how Reid himself regarded matters. Certainly, he and his circle in Aberdeen found Hume’s Treatise a stimulus to their thinking, as Reid expressly acknowledges in a letter to Hume dated 18 March 1763: