Patrick Geddes’s Intellectual Origins

Patrick Geddes is one of Scotland’s most remarkable thinkers of the late-nineteenth century. His environmental and cultural message endures today, yet the distinctively Scottish context to his thinking has not been properly acknowledged. This book situates Geddes within his own intellectual background (described by George Davie as ‘the democratic intellect’) and explores the relevance of that background to Geddes’s substantial national and international achievements across a truly impressive range of disciplines.

Key Features:

Explores Patrick Geddes Scottish intellectual background in depth for the first time;

Highlights Geddes’s insistence on the importance of arts to sciences and vice versa, and the distinctively Scottish context of this approach;

Considers the interdisciplinary achievements of Geddes in Edinburgh, Dundee, Paris, London and India;

Pays particular attention to his leadership of the Celtic Revival both from a Scottish perspective and with respect to international links, in particular with Indian cultural revivalists such as Ananda Coomaraswamy.