David Cranston (philosopher)

Cranston next published a set of Questiones on Aristotle's Prior Analytics in 1506, which he dedicated to the first Archbishop of Glasgow, Robert Blackadder.

[1][3] He was apparently among the pupils who urged Mair to issue the many textbooks in logic he did at the University of Paris, which were ultimately collated together in one volume in 1506.

[4] According to biographer J. H. Burns, by 1506 Cranston was "a prominent member of the circle around Mair", who together played a large part in reviving scholastic philosophy in the early 16th century.

[1] As Alexander Broadie put it, "Cranston was in many ways close to Mair, particularly in respect to their deep commitment to the scholastic tradition in logic and theology.

Mair's 1521 History of Greater Britain records an episode where the Continental theologians Almain and Pieter Crockaert teased Cranston in the Sorbonne over his nation's diet of oat bread, which he "strove to deny as an insult to his native country".

[1] In a similar bout of patriotic anger, a brief intermission between the dry philosophical discourse of the Questiones is afforded when Cranston attempts to discredit a passage in Jerome, which describes cannibalism among the Scots, as owing to a corrupted manuscript of the original.