Ossian’s Folk Psychology

摘要

James Macpherson's Ossian poems, sophisticated forgeries published as Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), exerted a seminal influence upon early Romantic nationalism. In spite of well-founded doubts regarding their authenticity, these ostensible records of ancient Gaelic traditions captivated audiences throughout Europe, as well as luminaries such as David Hume, Denis Diderot, and Johann Gottfried Herder. In "Ossian's Folk Psychology," John Savarese provides fresh insight into Macpherson's project by exploring the influence of contemporaneous theories about embodied cognition on both the style and content of the Ossian poems. Savarese begins by contextualizing the works within the broader philosophical discourses of the Scottish Enlightenment, emphasizing theories of mind advanced by Macpherson's contemporaries at the University of Aberdeen. He investigates the similarity between the "common sense" philosophy of the Aberdeen professor Thomas Reid, and the depiction of a coherent "folk psychology" within the Ossianic texts. Savarese links Reid's philosophy to the burgeoning late eighteenth-century interest in ancient and invented folk traditions. He suggests that "ballad collectors, antiquarians, and, in Macpherson's case, forgers, understood themselves to be turning from the realm of learned dispute to something like common sense" (730). Savarese relates this in turn to modern discourse around "folk psychology," which regards the capacity of attributing mental states to others, or mindreading, as a basic human cognitive capacity.