Abstract
FOR more than a century, largely on account of the eminence of its occupants, the chair of logic and metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh has been very generally, although quite unofficially, regarded as Scotland's premier philosophical chair. Since 1836 there have been four occupants, Sir William Hamilton (1836–1856), Campbell Fraser (1856–1891), Pringle-Pattison (1891–1919) and Norman Kemp Smith from 1919 to the end of the present academic session, when he retires. All four were celebrated for their mastery of the history of ideas, particularly in the eighteenth century and around it: Sir William Hamilton by work which, nominally at least, took its origin from Thomas Reid, Fraser by his unwearying labours on Berkeley, Pringle-Pattison by his dominant neo-Kantianism, and Kemp Smith by his massive study of Kant and of Hume. It is not very reckless to suggest that the last of the four professors surpassed all the others in this common tradition. Our standards in this field are very much higher in the present century than in the last, and only partially because the last had done so much. The intensive study of Kant which is so marked a feature of contemporary British academic philosophy owes more to Kemp Smith's "Commentary" than to the pen of any other English-writing author. His work on Hume, beginning with two masterly articles in Mind (1905), and continued in his edition of Hume's "Dialogues" (1935) has (perhaps) concluded with his "Philosophy of David Hume", a book which outstripped all other contemporary work on Hume, British or foreign, by a very comfortable margin. Kemp Smith brought to his classroom the high qualities that he showed in his writings; and all his varied contacts with students, colleagues and the public gained, in addition, from his broad humanity, his deep interest in the social problems of the present day and his catholic appetite for modern history and biography. He knew the United States well, for he was professor in Princeton between 1906 and his return to Europe to serve in the Ministry of Information during the War of 1914–18, and, in 1923, he was a visiting professor in Berkeley, California. A friend to both sides of the Atlantic, he was, is, and, one hopes, will long continue to be, one of the strongest links in the chain of Anglo-American unity and understanding in academic affairs.
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Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh: Prof. N. Kemp Smith. Nature 155, 231 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155231a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155231a0