George Davie’s remarkable works suggest that the difference of Scottish learned culture is much greater than the Irish one, historically much more impacted by the English. He also shows that the English have mostly misunderstood Hume and his legacy.

My own gloss on this is that from ultimately ‘Cambridge Platonism’ the Scots focussed on sympathy/common sense/sympathy/feeling as linking mind to nature and mind to mind in society. Their tradition was more realist than idealist. With James Ferrier the Platonic root returned.

Thus Ferrier (who correctly saw Reid as more ‘representationalist than Hume!) linked the common sense tradition (shared by Hume!) with Biran in France and elements of Hegel. He argued to a transcendent God from inseparability of matter to mind and yet our mind’s non grasp of this

So he refused either crude realism or crude idealism. Mediation by body and sense meant Scots had little place for Kant and supposed critical turn. They only turned to Kant with Kemp Smith with collapse of Scottish trad in wake of Intra-Presbyterian battles.

Donald Mackinnon was seriously Scottish in his concern with Plato and Aristotle. But all too English in his Kant obsession. Alasdair Mackintyre has strong elements of recapturing the real Scots tradition.

Davie also shows how seemingly obscure debates about geometry were core for this tradition. Unlike the English trad Scots allowed that abstracted lines perceived by common sense were real. They were nearer here to trad form as species etc.

Geometry was put above algebra unlike with Descartes and very like Vico and Doria in Naples. (Did Proclus hover behind this for them also?). Again this is to do with intrinsic links of mind to matter. It likely leads into later Scottish views of both biology and town planning.

Davie also points out how Burns was at once demotic and learned, popular and high cultural. Really no English poet was like this.

Could there even be some link between the Scottish sense of sympathetic links that even Hume sees as ‘occult’ yet real and a folk sense of the uncanny? Despite scepticism, does not one see this in both Burns and Scott?