Witherspoon's common sense approach to morality was more influenced by the Enlightenment ethics of Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid than the Christian virtue of Jonathan Edwards.
: free will, free ordination, fate, faith, the sacredness of truth, the high duty of cultivating virtue, and the meanness of vice, the nobility of patriotism, the attributes of God, and the arguments for and against the existence of the deity as these have been set forth in Hume on one side, and Reid, Dugald Stewart and Brosn on the other, the hollowness of idolatry and the shames of priesthood.
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Hannay argues that consciousness and the first-person point of view cannot be analysed or displaced by scientific materialism, nor can they be explained functionally, a view close to that of Thomas Reid, William Hamilton, and Ferrier.
He studied at Glasgow university under George Jardine, who was a friend and student of Thomas Reid.