Journal of Scottish Thought Volume 6 John Laird: A Scots Professor General Editor: Cairns Craig This edition edited by Cairns Craig. ‘Introduction © Cairns Craig The Journal of Scottish Thought is a peer reviewed, open access journal published annually by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. Correspondence should be addressed to The Journal of Scottish Thought, 19 College Bounds, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3UG. Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY. Published by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies University of Aberdeen 2018 ISSN 1755 9928 Introduction John Laird was Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen from 1922 till 1946, during which time he published fourteen individual books ranging across almost all aspects of philosophy, as can be gathered from some of their titles: The Idea of the Soul (1924), The Idea of Value (1929), Morals and Western Religion (1931), An Enquiry into Moral Notions (1935), Mind and Deity (1941). He also addressed the history of philosophy in books such as Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature (1932) and Theism and Cosmology (1940), as well as issues of contemporary debate in Modern Problems in Philosophy (1928). Even if he was never thought of as one of the leading philosophers of his generation, his career charts many of the key developments of modern philosophy, from the ‘new realism’ that he took up from G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell in the aftermath of World War I – his A Study in Realism appeared in 1920 – to the consequences of contemporary particle physics for our understanding of determinism and free will, as he explored in his posthumously published On Human Freedom which appeared in 1947. Laird’s career was equally symptomatic of the discipline of philosophy in Scotland in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. A fi rst degree from Edinburgh University led him to Cambridge from where he graduated in 1920. He was then appointed as an assistant at St Andrews University before taking up a lectureship at Dalhousie University in Canada. Many Scots philosophers of the late nineteenth century had emigrated to posts in Canada or Australasia and one of them, John Watson, whom Laird met while Watson was giving his Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow in the early 1910s, was probably responsible for Laird’s appointment at Dalhousie. Unlike Watson, who made his career in Canada and helped shape that nation’s emerging culture, Laird only taught for one year in Canada before returning to take up a professorship at Queen’s in Belfast – another common route for Scottish academics keen to fi nd a way back to Scotland. George Elder Davie, for instance, spent a decade and a half at Queen’s after the Second World War before returning to Edinburgh and among Laird’s colleagues was G. Gregory Smith whose Scottish Literature: Character and Infl uence (1919) was fi rst delivered as lectures in Belfast. Laird’s return to Scotland allowed him to become what he described as ‘A iv Autobiography of a Scots Professor Scots Professor’ and it was the title that he gave to an autobiography penned in the 1940s, the manuscript of which is with others of his papers in Aberdeen University Library. This issue of The Journal of Scottish Thought publishes Laird’s autobiography for the fi rst time. With it, however, we also re-publish Laird’s Recent Philosophy, a book fi rst written for the ‘Home University Library’ and published in 1936. In it, Laird does not simply give an account of recent British philosophy but an account of recent philosophy in France, Germany and Italy as well as the United States. It has sometimes been suggested that Aberdeen University in the 1930s was intellectually soporifi c, content to service communities from the North of Scotland and disengaged from the intellectual mainstream of British, let alone European thought. Laird himself may seem to confi rm that view when he notes that one of the advantages of Aberdeen was that in some years he had no Honours students (i.e. those in the third and fourth years of their degrees) and was therefore free to focus on his writing – writing which he treats as never of very great signifi cance. But Recent Philosophy reveals an Aberdeen philosopher who has not only mastered a vast range of European philosophies, but has identifi ed those that will go on, after the Second World War, to be central to the development of the discipline – the phenomenology of Husserl, the ‘existence’ philosophy of Heidegger and the ‘new mediævalism’ of a revived Thomism. None of these accorded with the kind of ‘realism’ that Laird had himself espoused in his own early books, a fact which makes his enthusiastic response to them all the more remarkable. Recent Philosophy was a small book for an audience of the self-educating, but Laird treated his audience to a broad perspective on what was involved in ‘recent philosophy’, one that must have come as a revelation to most of them. What it testifies to, however, is the on-going engagement of Scottish thinkers with the European heritage that had been central to the philosophical idealism promoted by Scottish philosophers before the First World War and which was to be continued by the likes of John McQuarrie, translator of Heidegger’s Being and Time, or Thomas Torrance, who did so much to promote the theology of Karl Barth. Laird’s work may be only an introduction, but it would be hard to think of anyone else who could have done justice to such a wide range of recent philosophies, giving a very different significance to the term ‘A Scots Professor’ from what one might have anticipated. Cairns Craig University of Aberdeen John Laird The Autobiography of a Scots Professor (from the manuscript in the Aberdeen University archive) I Childhood and Schooling I shall offer no excuse for this attempt at an autobiography. If it is ever published, it will be published posthumously, and I shall not burden my executors with any directions about it. I am fond of writing, and I am interested in myself and in my recollections. I was born on the 17th of May, 1887 at or about 5 o’clock in the afternoon. So it is stated on my birth certifi cate, and my father was very meticulous about such entries. In this instance he was a fi rst father. I’m sure I don’t know what in me is due to heredity and what to environment so I shall say something about both together. My environment and the family traditions were nearly-scholarly. I was a son of the manse – of a largish Free Church manse adjacent to a tiny Free Church in the parish of Durris near the banks of the Dee. My father was a scholar manqué. He had been in business in early life and had gone to Edinburgh University too late to win high academic distinction. Or so it was thought. He had been very diligent in his divinity course at the New College in Edinburgh, and there he was fi rst in his year; but he had little self-confi dence and was rather desultory in application. His dreams, however, were of scholarship, and in that my mother agreed with him. She had a very lively mind with amazingly acute, although not very balanced, human perceptions. Her ideas were neither well-munitioned nor well-disciplined, and I don’t suppose that her literary judgment was impeccable. She had romantic tastes in literature combined with a genuine love for old-time commentaries on the Scriptures, such as Matthew Henry’s. I had a long clerical ancestry. My paternal grandfather was a Moderator of the Free Church and was what was called a “Disruption Worthy”. (Lots of people, when they were introduced to me said they had known my grandfather. John Buchan did, for instance, and there was a pause before he treated the remark as a joke. So I suppose my grandfather had some reputation). He was a committee-man, I am told, with an admirable capacity for speaking effectively on every subject and on every occasion. His father at the age of eighty-three had also been a Disruption Worthy – I suspect a very unwilling one. He had 2 Childhood and Schooling masterful sons. I have always been entertained by what I have heard of him. He contrived to make quite a lot of money partly from the farmers’ opulence in the Napoleonic Wars, partly by teaching the neighbouring gentry. In the end he bought an estate near the famous Drovers’ Road in the Lothians. Having married a girl of fi fteen – an English girl, I believe, who was a governess – he had a family of fi fteen or thereabouts, half of whom grew up. He provided for all the survivors quite handsomely. I thought this very creditable, especially as Portmoak, his Fifeshire parish seemed to be largely composed of rabbit warrens. What interested me most about him, however, was his indomitable courage. He nursed three of his children in a typhus epidemic, and three in a cholera epidemic, segregating himself and them from the rest of the household. He wasn’t successful as a nurse; for all the six died. But at least he was brave. I have also been told that, being in a catalepsy, he was twice laid out for burial before he fi nally died. I have some of his sermons. (He wrote them out and then learned them by heart).