Common Sense Philosophy Research Articles

Bringing Plurality Together: Common Sense, Thinking and Philosophy in Arendt

ABSTRACTArendt's concept of common sense has generally been misunderstood. It is almost exclusively interpreted in light of Kant's common sense, either as an espousal of the latter or as a distortion of it. This narrow reading of Arendtian common sense has led to a problem, as her uses of the concept do not always fit its Kantian understanding. This has led to accusing her of being inconsistent, or as holding on to several, incompatible concepts of common sense.This article argues that Arendt has one complex concept of common sense, used more or less consistently throughout her writings. Rather than understanding Arendt's common sense in light of Kant's, as most readers do, I demonstrate its links to Aristotle and to the eighteenth‐century Scottish school of common sense. By doing so I turn attention to a difficulty that has thus far not been adequately treated, namely the fact that Arendt presents two, allegedly contradictory pictures of the relation between common sense on the one hand and science and philosophy on the other: a picture in which science and philosophy depend upon common sense, versus one in which they find themselves in a conflict that eventually leads to the loss or demise of common sense. The last part of the article suggests a way to settle the tension between these two pictures, by understanding the political significance Arendt ascribes to them as two distinct yet complementary ways of approaching the modern phenomenon of totalitarianism.

“JACOBINS” AT PRINCETON: STUDENT RIOTS, RELIGIOUS REVIVALISM, AND THE DECLINE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1800–1817

This essay considers how American Enlightenment moralists and Evangelical religious revivalists responded to “Jacobinism” at the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University, from 1800 through 1817. At this time, disruptive student activities exemplified alleged American “Jacobin” conspiracies against civil society. The American response to “Jacobins” brought out tensions between two different competing intellectual currents at the College of New Jersey: a revival of Christian religious principles led by Princeton trustee Reverend Ashbel Green and, in contrast, the expansion of Samuel Stanhope Smith's system of moral education during his tenure as college president from 1795 through 1812. As a moralist, Smith appealed to Scottish Common Sense philosophy in teaching the instinctive “rules of duty” as a way to correct unrestrained “passions” and moderate “Jacobin” radicalism. In doing so, Smith developed a moral quasi-relativism as an original feature of his moral philosophy and contribution to American Enlightenment intellectual culture. Green and like-minded religious revivalists saw Princeton student uprisings as Smith's failure to properly address irreligion. This essay shows the ways in which “Jacobinism” and then the emerging age of religious revivalism, known as the Second Great Awakening, arrived at the cost of Smith's “Didactic Enlightenment” at Princeton.

Providential Naturalism and Miracles: John Fearn's Critique of Scottish Philosophy

According to Thomas Reid, the development of natural sciences following the model of Newton's Principia and Optics would provide further evidence for the belief in a provident God. This project was still supported by his student, Dugald Stewart, in the early nineteenth century. John Fearn (1768–1837), an early critic of the Scottish common sense school, thought that the rise of ‘infidelity’ in the wake of scientific progress had shown that the apologetic project of Reid and Stewart had failed. In reaction to Reid and Stewart, he proposed an idealist philosophy that would dispense with the existence of matter, and would thus cut at the root what he thought was the main source of modern atheism. In this paper, I consider Fearn's critique of Reid and Stewart in his main works: First Lines of the Human Mind (1820) and Manual of the Physiology of Mind (1829). I also consider Fearn's arguments against Hume and in favour of a renewed apologetics in An Essay on the Philosophy of Faith and the Economy of Revelation (1815).

'Ungovernable Feelings and Passions': Common Sense Philosophy and Mental State Defences in Nineteenth Century Scotland

During the nineteenth century, changing conceptions of mental disorder had profound implications for the way that criminal responsibility was conceived. As medical writers and practitioners increasingly drew attention to the complexities of insanity, the grounds on which mentally abnormal offenders could be excused began to seem unduly restrictive. By way of a contribution to our understanding of this development, this article examines how the growing disparity unfolded in Scotland. I argue that the requirements of the insanity defence, as set out within judicial directions, reflect core facets of Scottish Common Sense philosophical thought, including Thomas Reid’s view of human agency and understanding of ‘common sense’. Building on this contention, I suggest that Scottish Common Sense philosophy played an important role in the development of Scottish mental state defences more broadly, and can provide an original interpretation of the way the doctrines of provocation and diminished responsibility changed during this era.

Romanticism, Medicine, and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852 by Gavin Budge

BOOK REVIEWS 575 Thoroughly informed and conceptually sophisticated, Literary Advertising and the Shaping ofBritish Romanticism has unusual clarity, economy, and lev­ ity. As does Lee Erickson in his more abstract account of the economics of literature, The Economy of Literary Form, Mason enjoins us to take less for granted in our reading of periodical literature. Of course the suspicion Mason counsels cannot be easily contained. Like the “universal acid” ofold science fiction, it eats through whatever it touches. Reviews emerge within a system in which critics carry out a dual role, as cultural arbiter and commercial middleman. Ifperiodical criticism is bound up with advertising and “advertising logic,” it cannot rise above the charge of being a testimo­ nial. One might well expect Mason’s account to end in either the disgust of Adorno at yet another betrayal among the intelligentsia or the uncritical celebration of neo-liberal economists at yet another triumph of the invisi­ ble hand. But the scrutiny he recommends has positive value as well. Ma­ son regards Romantic era reviews as “some of the best and most woefully neglected writing of the age” (142). Reviews, like the magazines in which they appear, deserve the same critical rigor that we apply to poems and novels. In sorting out the complex strands of the “common genealogy” of literature and advertising, Mason wisely reminds us that we must know more about this strange relation before we say what it might mean. Mark Parker James Madison University Gavin Budge. Romanticism, Medicine, and the Natural Supernatural: Transcend­ ent Vision and Bodily Spectres, i~Sg-i8s2. London: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. viii+295. $110. The body has been making inroads into Romantic studies for over a dec­ ade now, with scholars from perspectives as varied as affect theory, the his­ tory ofmedicine, and cognitive literary studies exploring the complexity of Romantic writers’ concern with their own embodiment. While Gavin Budge’s Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural shares this con­ cern, it is more interested in the relationship between embodiment and idealism, a perspective registered by the title’s double reference to the “Natural Supernaturalism” of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and M. H. Abrams’s magisterial 1971 study ofthe same name. Budge’s book examines the “Ro­ mantic invocation ofa dual epistemological perspective, in which visionary intuitions are not reducible to the body but neither can the embodied character of perception be ignored” (8). He argues that Romantic and post-Romantic writers seeking such visions drew not on German Idealism, SiR, 54 (Winter 2015) 576 BOOK REVIEWS a key element in Abrams’s study, but on the Scottish Common Sense school of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. Their epistemology of a “transcendent language of perceptual signs” (7) offered writers a middle way between empiricism and idealism, in which embodied perception could, ifrightly understood, provide access to a transcendent real. Unfortu­ nately, as Budge argues, the dominant theories ofnineteenth-century med­ icine made authenticating such access difficult. Seemingly genuine mo­ ments of perceptual transcendence might instead be the fraudulent “bodily spectres” ofirritated nerves or an upset stomach. As a result, health—which Budge interprets as a body regulated so as not to mistake hallucinations for authentic visions—became a concern for any artist with an idealist bent. His book tracks this concern through the work of six such artists, begin­ ning in the eighteenth century with Ann Radcliffe and concluding in the mid-nineteenth with Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. Budge has recently edited a collection on the Common Sense tradition’s Romantic reception (Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Com­ mon Sense, 1780—1830 [Bucknell, 2007]), and his continued investment in recognizing this lineage shows in the current study. Indeed the book seems less concerned with revising our understanding of Romanticism’s relation­ ship to medicine than it does with reframing certain medically-inflected readings—such as the influence of Erasmus Darwin’s treatise Zoonomia on Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads—within the philosophical context of the Common Sense school. (Walter Jackson Bate’s absence from this study— his 1946 From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, not even listed in the bibliography—is puzzling, given that his landmark work...

Discussion and Comments: A Response to Prof. Prasad’s ‘Wittgenstein’s Criticism of Moore’s Propositions of Certainty…’

This paper is a response to Prof. B. Sambasiva Prasad’s paper, entitled ‘Wittgenstein’s Criticism of Moore’s Propositions of Certainty: Some Observation’ published in this journal, Volume XX, Number-3, July–September 2003. The objective of Prasad’s paper, as he puts it, is to examine Wittgenstein’s criticism of the propositions of certainty which Moore has made in his essays ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ and ‘Proof of an External World’ with the twin aims of refuting idealism and skepticism and upholding common sense realism. But, a close reading of Prasad’s paper reveals that its main agenda is to defend Moore by justifying his propositions and the realist project as a whole against Wittgenstein’s attack of them in On Certainty. The objective of my paper is to argue that Prasad’s defence of Moore is untenable, since he has tried to side with him without fully comprehending the logic behind Wittgenstein’s criticism of him. Prasad has sought to justify Moore’s propositions and his realism without taking into account Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and his conception of proposition, meaning, knowledge, certainty and doubt. My paper is also an attempt at asserting that Wittgenstein’s analysis of the problem of scepticism and the existence of the world and the ‘resolution’ thereof is more profound than those offered by Moore. It seeks to affirm Wittgenstein’s radical remark that the idealists are demented in doubting the existence of the world and the realists are doubly demented in trying to refute the idealists and prove the existence of the world of physical objects. The paper embodies my justification of Wittgenstein’s criticism of Moore on the four important issues with reference to which Prasad has tried to uphold Moore. It constitutes my objections to the observations and arguments which Prasad has made by way of defending Moore and denouncing Wittgenstein on these issues. The issues are (1) the nature of Moore’s propositions; (2) Moore’s use/misuse of the expression ‘I know’; (3) Moore’s and Wittgenstein’s approach to idealism/scepticism; and (4) their world-views.

Wordsworth's Spots of Time in Space and Time

With rare exceptions, William Wordsworth uses word to designate a geographical place. His often are exceptionally good locations. They include pre-Napoleonic French rich in all things that can soothe and please (October 1803 8), so calm and green and the deep and quiet of Peter Bell (365, 376), chosen in know an aged man (21), calmest fairest on earth of Recluse (1.73), favoured that he distinguishes from rest of whole earth in 1805 Prelude (10.701), pregnant of ground, dear appropriated spot, and hallowed of earth in Excursion (5.371, 945; 6.802), and many more. are also places where natural or human pleasure or pain has occurred, and they are invested with events that have occurred there. They include spot [...] made by Nature for herself' in Poems on Naming of Places (To M.H. 15) and natal of briar-rose in The Waterfall and Eglantine (23). Human Passion rivets to in Descriptive Sketches (298); Margaret's overgrown cottage garden has become a cheerless spot, and her cottage is a wretched in Ruined Cottage (60, 487); and where Martha Ray spends her days crying, Oh misery, in The Thorn is The to which she goes (92; also 91, 97, and 99). And so on. Spot is a common word in poetry. It is plain speech, entering language by 1200 CE, when it meant moral stain, blot, or blemish; a stigma or disgrace (OED), a meaning that resonates in Margaret's, Martha Ray's, and many other Wordsworthian spots. Its semantic range expands to include A small space or of ground; a particular or locality of limited extent around 1400. In as now, word often connotes spiritual, mental, bodily characteristics: a on one's face, on one's reputation, etc. Wordsworth, though, places these characteristics onto or into land. Critical accounts of spots of emphasize other issues than their complex placedness. Often they prioritize trauma that has occurred at (or in relation to) spots, as when Geoffrey Hartman shows that Wordsworth raise [s] himself from his obsession with specific place to deal with a Nature that assumes a tutelary role after he has violated it (212-4); or as when Peter Larkin shows that Wordsworth's of time' occupy a fault-line between trauma and aspiration (30). They highlight contradictions and conflicts in formulation of spots of time, as when Eugene Stelzig calls phrase famous[ly] paradoxical (533); or as when Alan Richardson observes that 'spots of time' is an oxymoron: an enigma designed to halt reading process and challenge conventional categories of literary experience (15; also Wedd 225-6). But contemporaries might have seen in phrase language that is apposite to common 18th century expressions of spatial-temporal connections. In 1990, Jack Stillinger observed that American educator Emma Willard used phrase spots of in her 1822 Ancient Geography, as Connected with Chronology and that, while she could not have read lines on spots, first published in 1850, her sentences are a veritable anthology of Wordsworthian concepts (Willard vii; Stillinger 71). Because of similarity between Willard and Wordsworth, Stillinger [s] that somewhere [...] there exists a pre-Wordsworthian discussion of of time in geographical or geographical-historical terms (72). Along these lines, I propose that spots of time, which first appeared in 1799 two-part Prelude, emerge from his decade-long contact with representations, conceptualizations, and theorizations of space and precursors of space-time. In spots of passages, Wordsworth engages with space-oriented writings and conversations of figures such as Isaac Newton, David Hartley, Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid, and Tom Wedgwood. …

George Combe and common sense.

This article examines the history of two fields of enquiry in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland: the rise and fall of the common sense school of philosophy and phrenology as presented in the works of George Combe. Although many previous historians have construed these histories as separate, indeed sometimes incommensurate, I propose that their paths were intertwined to a greater extent than has previously been given credit. The philosophy of common sense was a response to problems raised by Enlightenment thinkers, particularly David Hume, and spurred a theory of the mind and its mode of study. In order to succeed, or even to be considered a rival of these established understandings, phrenologists adapted their arguments for the sake of engaging in philosophical dispute. I argue that this debate contributed to the relative success of these groups: phrenology as a well-known historical subject, common sense now largely forgotten. Moreover, this history seeks to question the place of phrenology within the sciences of mind in nineteenth-century Britain.

Deciding as Intentional Action: Control over Decisions

Common-sense folk psychology and mainstream philosophy of action agree about decisions: these are under an agent's direct control, and are thus intentional actions for which agents can be held responsible. I begin this paper by presenting a problem for this view. In short, since the content of the motivational attitudes that drive deliberation and decision remains open-ended until the moment of decision, it is unclear how agents can be thought to exercise control over what they decide at the moment of deciding. I note that this problem might motivate a non-actional view of deciding—a view that decisions are not actions, but are instead passive events of intention acquisition. For without an understanding of how an agent might exercise control over what is decided at the moment of deciding, we lack a good reason for maintaining commitment to an actional view of deciding. However, I then offer the required account of how agents exercise control over decisions at the moment of deciding. Crucial to this account is an understanding of the relation of practical deliberation to deciding, an understanding of skilled deliberative activity, and the role of attention in the mental action of deciding.

Pentecostal Antitraditionalism and the Pursuit of Holiness

This paper introduces the Wesleyan Quadrilateral and summarizes how each of the sources (Scripture, tradition, experience and reason) were used in the thought of John Wesley. Next, an overview is given of the developments in the radical wing of the Holiness movement during the late nineteenth century that led to many Pentecostals valuing only three of the four sources: Scripture (through the Bible Reading Method), reason (through pragmatism and Common Sense Realism), and experience (through an emphasis on encountering God through supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit). In particular, the role of tradition in the Wesleyan-Holiness movement is compared and contrasted with early Pentecostal responses to church tradition as a viable source for theological reflection and decision-making. The issues of women in ministry, pacifism and oneness in early Pentecostalism are examined in order to demonstrate how Pentecostals either grounded their decisions in tradition or broke with tradition in the task of theological discernment. Finally, some proposals are made concerning how Pentecostals might learn from Wesley in order to reincorporate tradition as a Spirit-empowered resource for theological reflection.

Religion, “Moral Insanity,” and Psychology in Nineteenth-Century America

AbstractThis article explores arguments among medico-legal experts (including Amariah Brigham, Isaac Ray, John P. Gray, and W. A. Hammond) about the social and moral ramifications of expanding the definition of insanity to include moral insanity. This is an important corrective to a standard view that sees the movement to transform the insanity defense in nineteenth-century America as a rejection of the explanatory power of human depravity in the face of an optimistic understanding of human nature as found in Scottish common sense philosophy. The debate, especially between Ray and Brigham, on the one hand, and Gray, on the other, finally led to a situation in which religious discussions of sin, the will, grace, and the shape of the human self were legally sidelined.

Sentido común "común" y sentido común "sensato". Una reivindicación de Thomas Reid

Este artículo trata de mostrar que Thomas Reid (1710-1796) defendió no ya un sentido común “común”, sino uno “sensato”. Adicionalmente, se propone que la filosofía del sentido común de Reid es sumamente importante de entre las de su tipo.

From Francis Hutcheson to James McCosh: Irish Presbyterians and Defining the Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

SummaryThis article examines the disputes amongst Irish Presbyterians about the teaching of moral philosophy by Professor John Ferrie in the college department of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution in the early nineteenth century and the substantive philosophical and theological issues that were raised. These issues have largely been ignored by Irish historians, but a discussion of them is of general relevance to historians of ideas as they illuminate a series of broader questions about the definition and development of Scottish philosophy. These are represented in the move from two philosophers who had strong connections with Irish Presbyterianism—Francis Hutcheson, the early eighteenth-century moral sense philosopher and theological moderate from County Down, and James McCosh, nineteenth-century exponent of modified Common Sense philosophy at Queen's College Belfast and a committed evangelical. In particular, this article addresses three important themes—the definition and character of ‘the Scottish philosophy’, the relationship between evangelicalism and Common Sense philosophy, and the process of development and adaptation that occurred in eighteenth-century Scottish thought during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Common Sense Rhetorical Theory, Pluralism, and Protestant Natural Law

This paper offers re-assessment of Scottish Common Sense rhetoric and its relationship to pluralist practice and philosophical method. It argues that the rhetorical texts of George Campbell, Hugh Blair, and Alexander Bain can be read as a practical application of Scottish Common Sense philosophy. This offers a novel means of examining the relationship that Scottish rhetoric has to the philosophy of David Hume and also its own innovative philosophy of language. Finally, I argue that Scottish rhetoric makes a unique contribution to rhetorical methodology's key place in the creation of social and moral consensus.

Intelligible Realism about Consciousness: A Response to Nagel's Paradox

AbstractIs the location of consciousness in the objectively represented world intelligible? The paper examines the grounds for Nagel's negative answer, which can be presented as a response to the following paradox. (1) We are realists about consciousness. (2) Realism about a domain of reference requires commitment to the possibility of an objective, perspective‐free conception of it. (3) The phenomenal character of an experience can only be captured by means of perspectival concepts. According to Nagel, we can have either realism about consciousness or the link between realism and objectivity. He opts for the former, where this leads to the postulation of an essentially perspectivally reality inhabited by consciousness. I argue, contra Nagel, that questions about the intelligibility of locating consciousness in the objectively representable world should be asked relative the kinds of objectivity provided for by our spatial thought. Not only does this formally dissolve the paradox, as such thought allows for essential reliance on perspectival concepts; but it also shows how we do in fact make sense of the objective location of consciousness, in virtue of the link between spatial thought and something Strawson calls our ‘commonsense realism’ about physical objects, which ascribes ‘phenomenally‐laden’ properties to such objects.

Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America

Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America

On Cultivating a Transgressive Theological Imagination

While doing archival research for my part of a book on the history of practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, I came across very disturbing evidence for a fundamental failure of theological imagination on the part of seminary faculty during the nineteenth century. On the vexed matters of slavery and race, every faculty member at PTS who taught anything about practical theology until nearly the end of the 1800s could not imagine a society in which African Americans and Euro-Americans could live together as equals. A rigid Westminster orthodoxy undergirded with Scottish Common Sense philosophy constrained their interpretation of Scripture as well as their theological imagination in very unfortunate ways. While they all agreed that slavery as an institution was a blight upon humanity, not one of them could or would condemn it outright because of the way they read several texts in the Pauline corpus (none of which explicitly condemned slavery). As a result, they believed and taught generations of future pastors that they should leave politics to the politicians, that slaves should be taught to read in order that they might be able to read Scripture as an aid to salvation, and that slave owners should be admonished to treat slaves humanely, and that freed slaves should be sent en masse to colonize Liberia. Their theological imagination, underdeveloped as it was, can be seen in the admonitions concerning Liberia. Sending freed slaves back to Africa would, so they thought, address multiple problems. It would solve the race problem in the United States by removing black slaves and former slaves from society. They also thought it would contribute greatly to the evangelism challenge of the Great Commission by having people of African descent—whom they argued were constitutionally more adapted to survival on the African continent than were Euro-American missionaries—preaching the gospel to Africans. Astonishingly, even as late as 1877 (14 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and 12 years after the end of the Civil War) the one practical theologian on the seminary’s faculty still held to this line of thinking and articulated it before the American Colonization Society. Though there were voices like Marcus Theology Today 70(2) 105–108 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0040573613488311 ttj.sagepub.com

In Defence of the Scottish Enlightenment: Dugald Stewart's role in the 1805 John Leslie Affair

During a transitional period of Scottish history, responses to the French Revolution in the 1790s significantly affected Enlightenment intellectual culture across Scotland and, in particular, its existence in Edinburgh. The emergence of powerful counter-Enlightenment interests—championed by Henry Dundas—sought to censure the diffusion of ideas and values associated with France's revolution. In doing so, they targeted all controversial philosophical writings and liberal values for censorship and, in turn, gradually crippled the unique circumstances that had birthed the Scottish Enlightenment. Alarmed by the effect counter-Enlightenment policies had on Scottish intellectual culture, Dugald Stewart professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University (1785–1810) countered this threat with a system of moral education. His programme created a modern version of Thomas Reid's Common Sense philosophy whilst advancing that the best way to prevent the adoption of supposedly dangerous political and philosophical ideas was examining their errors. The tensions between counter-Enlightenment policies and Stewart's system of moral education erupted in the 1805 election of John Leslie as professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University, but the Leslie affair was not an isolated episode. This controversy embodied tensions over ecclesiastical politics in the Church of Scotland, national secular politics, and Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy. At the same time, Stewart believed the Leslie affair would determine the fate of not only Edinburgh University but also the Scottish universities’ entwined relationship with Enlightenment. This article examines how Dugald Stewart's prominent role in the 1805 John Leslie affair pitted counter-Enlightenment interests against those of an emerging generation of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Ferrier and the Myth of Scottish Common Sense Realism

Once a name to conjure with, Scottish idealist James Frederick Ferrier (1808–1864) is now a largely forgotten figure, notwithstanding the fact that he penned a work of remarkable power and originality: the Institutes of Metaphysic (1854). In ‘Reid and the Philosophy and Common Sense,’ an essay of 1847 which anticipates some of the central themes of the Institutes of Metaphysic, Ferrier presents an excoriating critique of Thomas Reid's brand of common sense realism. Understanding Ferrier's critique of Reid – its content, motivations, and significance – is the task of the present essay.

Conceptual Idealism and Reformed Metaphysical Method

In an article published in 1991, Nicholas Rescher wrote:Idealism, broadly speaking, is doctrine that reality is somehow mind-correlative or mind-coordinated. However, specifically conceptual idealism. stands in contrast to an ontological doctrine to effect that somehow constitutes or produces world's matter. Instead, it maintains that an adequate descriptive characterization of physical (material) reality must make implicit reference to mental operations-that some commerce with mental characteristics and operations is involved in explanatory exposition of what is at issue the real world.'Rescher conceives human reason as already shaped by inherited stances, assumptions, values, and received knowledge, at varying levels of attributed significance. In this context, notes theologian Paul D. Murray, for Rescher the rational thing to do is to take one's situatedness seriously whilst continually opening it out to testing against what else there is and what else comes to light. Consequently, Murray concludes,Truth is something that we can legitimately assume ourselves to be articulating in part but which inevitably eludes us in toto and towards which, therefore, we need to understand ourselves as being orientated in mode of aspiration rather than possession, or arrival.. Reseller's thinking. evinces a commitment to acknowledging pluralist reality of world of difference in which we exist and need to negotiate this appropriately.3The fact that Rescher formulates and defends a form of idealism, in tradition of Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, Royce, McTaggart3 brings him closer to a rich British idealist tradition, which is arguably most quintessentially represented by R. G. Collingwood. This framework of conceptual idealism outlined by Rescher some thirty years after Collingwood accommodates very well latter's previous dismissal of commonsense realism and his placing of Kantian transcendentalism and Hegelian immanentism under auspices of Christian concept of God.The definition Collingwood gave to (nai ve, or crude) realism-in his unpublished text Realism and Idealism-reads: [For realist,] object makes no difference to knowing, so that knowing. is a single absolutely. undifferentiated activity and is based on realist's assumption that reality consists in two radically self-contained worlds: objective world of things known and subjective world of cognitive activity,4 whereas for Collingwood itself is a compositum of cognitive activities and their object. Commonsense realism's assumption that things exist of our or mind is criticized by conceptual idealist thinkers-whose voices find an unifying echo in Collingwood's analyses-for its failure to realize that real condition for such a claim is thought itself, so that things considered as existing outside our or are in fact included in it once we think of them as being external to our thought. Similarly, things which are claimed to exist independently of thought cannot otherwise be asserted as existent but by an act of thought.5 As a reputed commentator of Collingwood noted, Oxford don saw every act of consciousness as a creative act of mind, in which exercises some degree of choice and has some goal in view. fiAs an inheritor of a powerful British idealist tradition, Collingwood was accompanied in twentieth century by important fellow thinkers such as Henry Jones, Clement Charles Julian Webb, Alfred Ernest Taylor, and Michael Foster. At present, writes Stephen Toulmin,Collingwood's philosophical arguments speak to us more directly and forcefully than they did to his Oxford contemporaries. The realist positions put forward by John Cook Wilson at Oxford, Ernst Mach in Vienna, and G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. turned philosophical clock back before Kant, and revived earlier traditions of British empiricism. …