system
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human
What led to British philosophy being centered around ideas of practicality, empiricism and "common sense" ideas?

From Francis Bacon's scientific method, Newton's physics, Mill's utilitarianism, the 3 influential British empiricists, to Russell and analytic philosophy, British philosophy seems historically based largely in practicality and empiricist philosophy. This seems pretty unique compared to French rationalism and German idealism. Has anyone written about why this may have come to be?
gpt
Is this British philosophy, or is this a particular construction of British philosophy developed in a motivated way by deemphasizing cases that don't fit the view and emphasizing those that do?

I mean, if British philosophy is the tradition of common sense empiricism, what do we make of Cambridge Platonism, which represents the clearest and most significant extension of Renaissance Platonism into the early modern period? What do we make of the school around John Norris, which represents the clearest and most significant continuation of Malebranche's program? What do we make of the culture around Coleridge, arguably the most influential Anglophone philosopher of his generation, and function as an Anglicizing gateway for continental ideas about idealism and romanticism? What do we make of British Idealism, arguably the dominant tradition in academic British philosophy for several generations, and a the most robust continuation of a broadly Hegelian program even after Hegel had lost his hold on the continent?

Usually, these movements get presented as the losers in a process of historical development: Cambridge Platonism loses to Lockean empiricism, which then stands for us as the true spirit of British philosophy; British Hegelianism loses to Russell and Moore's logical atomism. But it's important to note that when we say things like this, we're not presenting a description of what philosophical ideas were most popular in Britain during most of the time, but rather presenting a motivated history according to which we take it that certain ideas -- though not necessarily most popular for most of the time -- count for us as the *right* ones.

On top of this, the resulting construction of a supposedly integrated tradition of British empiricism suppresses what were in their time quite different phenomena. Philosophers like Hume, Butler, and Shaftesbury, now happily recruited as paragons of British empiricism, positioned themselves as critics of Lockean empiricism. Newton, who we're happy in retrospect to reinterpret in, say, Berkeleyan-Humean terms, was himself a rather more ambivalent figure and significantly indebted to, for instance, Cambridge Platonism -- and found, in his time, his most intimate spokesman in Samuel Clarke, an emphatically "rationalist" sounding philosopher with massive influence in his time, who is himself now often suppressed in folk histories of British philosophy for not fitting with the desired stereotype.