This evening I attended the first in the University of Aberdeen’s series of Inaugural Lectures. Held in the very fine surroundings of Kings College we were treated to a talk that was fascinating in its breadth and confident in its delivery.
Professor Cairns Craig (a fine Scottish name if ever I heard one) is Director of the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University and gave his lecture on Philosophy, Physics and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century Scotland and Ireland.
Starting off with his initial interests in the poet W.B. Yeats he showed how the escapism of the Victorian interest in Faerie was seen as a decline in Scottish intellectual thought; that the Scottish Enlightenment ended and left behind it no remarkable legacy.
He then used the lecture to argue against this postulation, showing how the advances in physics, and particular the new science of energy (culminating in James Clerk Maxwell’s work on electromagnetism), directly influenced the philosophical and literary activities that were going on at the time.
It was interesting to see how the advanced ideas of the day (such as entropy) found their way into the public imagination through their utilisation by fantasy writers such as J.M. Barrie (in Peter Pan) and Robert Louis Stevenson (in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde).
It was also interesting to hear the part religion played here, in that most of the characters were religious and that they accepted what they were doing, and discovering, as something that resonated rather than conflicted with their belief. A significant disadvantage is that they failed to recognise some of the work of atheist intellectuals of the day, and in particular that of David Hume who was denied senior academic positions because of his atheism.
The lecture was delivered in such a way that the ideas were easy to follow, illustrated with quotes and passages which reinforced the message, nd that opened up my understanding of Scottish philosophy and other intellectual thoughts in the time leading up to the First World War. Given the content there are a number of avenues I will be reading into further.
