Overview

This volume expounds the influence of Robert Burns’s reading of Philosophy on his life and work, supplementing this with his personal encounters with those philosophers he met. The work begins with the Homespun Philosophy of his early years under the tutelage of William Burnes and John Murdoch, then examines in detail some of the texts of John Locke, Adam Smith and Francis Hutcheson, including other writers who reflect Hutcheson’s thinking. Further chapters include the exploration on Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Archibald Alison and William Greenfield. Robert Burns and the Philosophers does not purport to be a work of philosophy but rather to show the poet’s reaction to the subject and the development of his understanding. This work opens up a subject that hitherto has been almost unexplored.

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9780815363675

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J. Walter McGinty received his PhD at the University of Strathclyde on ‘Literary, Philosophical and Theological Influences on Robert Burns’. Dr McGinty is an ordained Minister, having trained for the Ministry of the Church of Scotland at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College Glasgow. Other publications are Robert Burns and Religion, (Ashgate); and Robert Burns the Book Lover: From Reader to Writer, (Humming Earth.) The present volume completes the trilogy of books that have examined the influence of the reading of Robert Burns. McGinty has also written a biography, ‘An Animated Son of Liberty’: A Life of John Witherspoon, (Arena) and has published papers on ‘John Goldie and Robert Burns’ and ‘Milton’s Satan and Burns’s Auld Nick’ in Studies in Scottish Literature Vols XXIX and XXXIII.

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