James Frederick Ferrier developed his philosophy from a common sense background. However, his rejection of common sense philosophy in particular and Enlightenment philosophy in general results in the development of a system of idealism. In his series of lectures ‘An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness - Parts I to VII’, which appeared in Blackwoods Magazine (1838–39), he outlines the problem with modern philosophy and argues that philosophy should follow a new direction. In his view, the most peculiar and interesting (...) aspect of humanity is consciousness. He contends that the attempt to develop a ‘science of man’ is impossible because it transforms a person into an object of study and thereby fails to capture the most distinctive aspect of humanity, namely, consciousness. According to Ferrier, philosophy should be an extension of consciousness itself; it is: ‘consciousness sublimed’. This paper will outline the central arguments in ‘An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness’ and show that an early example of British idealism was not only developed out of the common sense tradition but shares with common sense philosophy a focus on the immediate evidence of consciousness, placing the relationship between thought and world at the centre of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

James Frederick Ferrier is probably best known for the idealism he presents in An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness and Institutes of Metaphysic, in which Ferrier critiques and offers an alternative to Common Sense Realism – the dominant school of thought in Scotland in the 18thand early 19thcenturies – spearheaded by Thomas Reid and his followers. What has received significantly less attention in the literature, however, is Ferrier's 1866 Lectures on Greek Philosophy, which serves as an important point of (...) connection between the moral philosophy that Ferrier develops in the Introduction and Institutes and what Ferrier takes to be the ethics that Socrates taught and according to which he lived. In this paper, I examine Plato's early dialogues in order to demonstrate that Ferrier's ethics should be understood as a descendent of Socratic ethics insofar as both Ferrier and Socrates endorse the view that individual freedom is only possible through a life of thought that transcends the particularities of sensation. (shrink)

The following essay, whose title has been provided by me for this occasion, is taken from James Ferrier's work The Institutes of Metaphysic where it appears in Section I., the general theme of which is ‘The Epistemology, or Theory of Knowing’. The essay is a statement and elaboration of the ‘ninth proposition’ of the Institutes, and an examination of its implications as these bear upon knowledge of mind and self. The precise source of the text is the 3rd edition of (...) the Institutes of Metaphysic (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons 1875). Ferrier indicates earlier that ‘generally throughout this work the word “cognition” signifi es the known, the cognitum. This remark is necessary lest the reader should suppose that it signifi es the act rather than the object of knowledge’ (p. 156). In the last section of this introduction I list the preceding eight propositions. (shrink)