Abstract

In this chapter the intellectual-ecclesiastical context of religious philosophizing in Scotland in the second half of the nineteenth century is briefly sketched, and a selection of thinkers who followed in the wake of Reid’s common sense realism is introduced—Hamilton, Campbell Fraser and Flint among them. Responses to past philosophers and to then current trends in philosophy are reviewed. At a time when classical theistic arguments could no longer serve as once they had; when the ‘evidences’ of miracle and prophecy were increasingly deemed suspect; and when evolutionary thought required a response, apologetic questions occupied such writers as Iverach and Bruce and Mackintosh. None of the philosophers here discussed could finally keep theology at bay.