This group is intended both for the discusssion of the work of Scottish philosophers and the application of philosophical categories to discussion of contemporary Scottish society.

It may be helpful to give a preliminary description of what is generally referred to by the term. Scottish thinkers have recognised themselves as such from medieval times, as one aspect identifying the intellectual traditions in which they have sought to inscribe their work. This continued in the little known authors of the 17th century.

The thinkers of the "Enlightement", such as David Hume and Thomas Reid, also engaged with their society to a greater extent than is sometimes recognised. The concept of "Scottish philosophy" however, narrowed in the 19th century in the work of Victor Cousin and James McCosh to exclude Hume at the expense of Reid's "common sense".

The idealist movement of circa 1850-1950 was centred about equally in Glasgow and Oxford, its leading thinker being Edward Caird (1835-1908), a proponent of Home Rule. The idealist movement adopted the Hegelian idea of the unity of experience in order to contextualise specific aspects of experience and intellectual disciplines.

Since then, resistance to "analytic philosophy" has been sporadic, partly owing to the kind of homogenising institutional/political pressures described in in George Davie's Crisis of the Democratic Intellect (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1986), but it attained a high level in the work of John Macmurray (1889-1976), whose work draws on the idealist tradition and French sources in support of a version of philosophical Christianity, harking back to Quaker authors like Robert Barclay in the 17th century.