John Major (philosopher)

John Major (or Mair; also known in Latin as Joannes Majoris and Haddingtonus Scotus; 1467–1550) was a Scottish philosopher, theologian, and historian who was much admired in his day and was an acknowledged influence on all the great thinkers of the time.

He was an extremely curious and very observant man, and used his experiences – of earthquakes in Paisley, thunder in Glasgow, storms at sea, eating oatcakes in northern England – to illustrate the more abstract parts of his logical writings.

He says he stayed in Haddington "to a pretty advanced age" and he remembers the sound of the King James III's bombardment of the nearby castle of Dunbar, which was in 1479.

In 1490, probably under the influence of Robert Cockburn, another Haddington man, destined to be an influential bishop (of Ross and later of Dunkeld), he decided to go to Paris to study among the great numbers of Scots there at the time.

[1] He remembers the bells – "on great feast days, I spent half the night listening to them"[citation needed] – but was obviously well-prepared, as he left for Paris after three terms.

There were many currents of thought in Paris but he was heavily influenced, as were fellow Scots such as Lawrence of Lindores by the nominalist and empiricist approach of John Buridan.

He consorted with scholars of later renown, some from his hometown, Robert Walterston, and his home country (David Cranston of Glasgow, who died in 1512), but mostly they were the luminaries of the age, including Erasmus, whose reforming enthusiasms he shared, Rabelais and Reginald Pole.

He also uses the new discoveries to argue for the possibility of innovation in all knowledge saying "Has not Amerigo Vespucci discovered lands unknown to Ptolemy, Pliny and other geographers up to the present?

Nevertheless, in 1512, like a good humanist, he learned Greek from Girolamo Aleandro (who re-introduced the study of Greek to Paris) who wrote "Many scholastics are to be found in France who are keen students in different kinds of knowledge and several of these are among my faithful hearers, such as John Mair, Doctor of Philosophy..." In 1518 he returned to Scotland to become Principal of the University of Glasgow (and also canon of the cathedral, vicar of Dunlop and Treasurer of the Chapel Royal).

Although the documentary evidence available to Major was limited, his scholarly approach was adopted and improved by later historians of Scotland, including his pupil Hector Boece, and John Lesley.

His approach largely followed Nominalism which was in tune with the growing emphasis on the absolutely unconstrained nature of God, which in turn emphasised his grace and the importance of individual belief and submission.

Major wrote in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard "Our native soil attracts us with a secret and inexpressible sweetness and does not permit us to forget it".

He attacks a whole range of questions from a generally 'nominalist' perspective – a form of philosophical discourse whose tradition derives from the high Middle Ages and was to continue into that of the Scottish and other European empiricists.

According to Alexander Broadie, Major's influence on this latter tradition reached as far as the 18th and 19th century Scottish School of Common Sense initiated by Thomas Reid.

The highly logical and technical approach of Medieval philosophy – perhaps added to by Major's poor written style as well as his adherence to the Catholic party at the time of the Reformation – explain in some part why this influence is still somewhat occluded.

This pronouncement was hedged in with many subtle qualifications, and the Spanish crown was never efficient at enforcing it, but it can be regarded as the fount of human rights law.