Thomas Reid

Region	Western Philosophy
Era	18th-century philosophy,
Color	#B0C4DE
Caption	Thomas Reid
Birth date	April 26, 1710
Birth place	Strachan, Kincardineshire, Scotland
Death date	October 07, 1796
Death place	Glasgow, Scotland
School tradition	Scottish School of Common Sense,Scottish Enlightenment
Main interests	Metaphysics, Epistemology, Mind, Ethics
Influences	Hume, Cicero, Aquinas, Berkeley
Influenced	Cousin, Plantinga, C.S. Peirce, Moore, Alston, James, Hartley
Notable ideas	direct realism, proper functionalism (later made popular by Alvin Plantinga)

The Reverend Thomas Reid, D.D. (7 May (26 April O.S.) 1710 – 7 October 1796), was a religiously trained Scottish philosopher, and a contemporary of David Hume, was the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, and played an integral role in the Scottish Enlightenment. The early part of his life was spent in Aberdeen, Scotland, where he created the 'Wise Club' (a literary-philosophical association) and graduated from the University of Aberdeen. He was given a professorship at King's College, Aberdeen in 1752, where he wrote An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (published in 1764). Shortly afterward he was given the prestigious Professorship of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow when he was called to replace Adam Smith. He resigned from this position in 1781.

Reid believed that common sense (in a special philosophical sense of sensus communis) is, or at least should be, at the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He disagreed with Hume, who asserted that we can never know what an external world consists of as our knowledge is limited to the ideas in the mind, and George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world is merely ideas in the mind. By contrast, Reid claimed that the foundations upon which our sensus communis are built justify our belief that there is an external world.

In his day and for some years into the 19th century, he was regarded as more important than David Hume. He advocated direct realism, or common sense realism, and argued strongly against the Theory of Ideas advocated by John Locke, René Descartes, and (in varying forms) nearly all Early Modern philosophers who came after them. He had a great admiration for Hume and had a mutual friend send Hume an early manuscript of his (Reid's) Inquiry. Hume responded that the "deeply philosophical" work "is wrote in a lively and entertaining matter," but that "there seems to be some defect in method," and criticized Reid for implying the presence of innate ideas.

Thomas Reid's Theory of Common Sense

His theory of knowledge had a strong influence on his theory of morals. He thought epistemology was an introductory part to practical ethics: When we are confirmed in our common beliefs by philosophy, all we have to do is to act according to them, because we know what is right. His moral philosophy is reminiscent of Latin stoicism in its emphasis on the agency of the subject and self-control. He often quotes Cicero, from whom he adopted the term "sensus communis". Reid's answer to Hume's skeptical and naturalist arguments was to enumerate a set of principles of common sense (sensus communis) which constitute the foundations of rational thought. Anyone who undertakes a philosophical argument, for example, must implicitly presuppose certain beliefs like, "I am talking to a real person," and "There is an external world whose laws do not change," among many other positive, substantive claims. For Reid, the belief in the truth of these principles is not rational; rather, reason itself demands these principles as prerequisites, as does the innate "constitution" of the human mind. It is for this reason (and possibly a mocking attitude toward Hume and Berkeley) that Reid sees belief in the principles of common sense as a litmus test for sanity. For example, in The Intellectual Powers of Man he states, “For, before men can reason together, they must agree in first principles; and it is impossible to reason with a man who has no principles in common with you.” One of the first principles he goes on to list is that “qualities must necessarily be in something that is figured, coloured, hard or soft, that moves or resists. It is not to these qualities, but to that which is the subject of them, that we give the name body. If any man should think fit to deny that these things are qualities, or that they require any subject, I leave him to enjoy his opinion as a man who denies first principles, and is not fit to be reasoned with.”

Reid also made positive arguments based in phenomenological insight to put forth a novel mixture of direct realism and ordinary language philosophy. In a typical passage in the Intellectual Powers he asserts that when he has a conception of a centaur, the thing he conceives is an animal, and no idea is an animal; therefore, the thing he conceives is not an idea, but a centaur. This point relies both on an account of the subjective experience of conceiving an object and also on an account of what we mean when we use words. Because Reid saw his philosophy as publicly accessible knowledge, available both through introspection and the proper understanding of how language is used, he saw it as the philosophy of common sense.

It has been claimed that his reputation waned after attacks on the Scottish School of Common Sense by Immanuel Kant (although Kant, only 14 years Reid's junior, also bestowed much praise on Scottish philosophy) and by John Stuart Mill. But Reid's was the philosophy taught in the colleges of North America during the 19th century and was championed by Victor Cousin, a French philosopher. Justus Buchler has shown that Reid was an important influence on the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who shared Reid's concern to revalue common sense and whose work links Reid to pragmatism. To Peirce, conceptions of truth and the real involve the notion of a community without definite limits (and thus potentially self-correcting as far as needed), and capable of a definite increase of knowledge. Common sense is socially evolved, open to verification much like scientific method, and constantly evolving, as evidence, perception, and practice warrant, albeit with a slowness that Peirce came only in later years to see, at which point he owned his "adhesion, under inevitable modification, to the opinion of...Thomas Reid, in the matter of Common Sense" (Peirce called his version "critical common-sensism"). By contrast, on Reid's concept, the sensus communis is not a social evolutionary product but rather a precondition of the possibility that humans could reason with each other.

Reid's reputation has revived in the wake of the advocacy of common sense as a philosophical method or criterion by G. E. Moore early in the 20th century, and more recently due to the attention given to Reid by contemporary philosophers, in particular philosophers of religion in the school of Reformed epistemology such as William Alston, Alvin Plantinga, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, seeking to rebut charges that theistic belief is irrational where it has no doxastic foundations (that is, where that belief is not inferred from other adequately grounded beliefs).

He wrote a number of important philosophical works, including Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764, Glasgow & London), Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788). In 1844, Schopenhauer praised Reid for explaining that the perception of external objects does not result from the raw data that is received through the five senses:

Other Philosophical Positions

Though known mainly for his epistemology, Reid is also noted for his views in the theory of action and the metaphysics of personal identity. Reid held an incompatibilist or libertarian notion of freedom, holding that we are capable of free actions of which we are the cause, and for which we are morally appraisable. Regarding personal identity, he rejected Locke's account that self-consciousness in the form of memory of one's experiences was the basis of a person's being identical with their self over time. Reid held that continuity of memory was neither necessary nor sufficient to make one numerically the same person at different times.

See also

Philosophy of perception

Reid's Works

1764. An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense.

1785. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man.

1788. Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind.

Until recently the standard edition of the Inquiry and the Essays has been the sixth edition of William Hamilton (ed.), Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1863. A new critical edition of these titles, plus correspondence and other important material, is being brought out by Edinburgh University Press as The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid. An accessible selection from Hamilton's 6th ed. is Thomas Reid's Inquiry and Essays, ed. Ronald Beanblossom and Keith Lehrer, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983.

Further reading

Barker, Stephen & Tom Beauchamp, eds., "Thomas Reid: Critical Interpretations" (1976).

Daniels, Norman. Thomas Reid's Inquiry:The Geometrey of Visibles and the Case for Realism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Davis, William C., Thomas Reid’s Ethics: Moral Epistemology on Legal Foundations. Continuum International, 2006. ISBN 0-826488-09-9

Ducheyne, Steffen. "Reid’s Adaptation and Radicalization of Newton’s Natural Philosophy". History of European Ideas 32 (2006) 173-189.

Haldane, John. "Reid, Scholasticism, and Current Philosophy of Mind" in M. Delgano and E. Matthews, eds., The Philosophy of Thomas Reid. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989.

Lehrer, Keith. Thomas Reid. London: Routledge, 1989.

Rowe, William. Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Wolterstorff, N. Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

References

External links

The Reid Project at the University of Aberdeen.

Redacted texts of Thomas Reid by Jonathan Bennett in current, modern English.

Reid @ Google Books

The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid - critical edition of Reid's philosophical treatises and previously unpublished materials

Category:Scottish Enlightenment Category:Scottish philosophers Category:Scottish theologians Category:18th-century philosophers Category:Early modern philosophers Category:Enlightenment philosophers Category:David Hume Category:Alumni of the University of Aberdeen Category:Academics of the University of Aberdeen Category:Academics of the University of Glasgow Category:People from Aberdeen Category:1710 births Category:1796 deaths