Today Sir William Hamilton, ninth baronet of Preston, is little more than a footnote in philosophy texts and histories. In his own time, however, he was regarded as one of the greatest and most erudite among living philosophers, and after his death his name was often mentioned alongside that of John Stuart Mill in discussions of philosophy and logic. Hamilton received this posthumous attention in part because of Mill's meticulous dissection of his ideas in An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in His Writings (1865). That Mill viewed Hamilton as a major representative of intuitionism and dogmatism testifies to Hamilton's significance in the decades following his death.

Hamilton was the most influential proponent of Scottish common sense philosophy, also called common sense realism, a school of thought founded in the late eighteenth century by Thomas Reid and elaborated by George Campbell...