Thomas Reid

Thomas Reid
Born	(1710-04-26)26 April 1710 Strachan, Kincardineshire, Scotland
Died	7 October 1796(1796-10-07) (aged 86) Glasgow, Scotland
Era	18th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Scottish School of Common Sense, Scottish Enlightenment
Main interests	Metaphysics, Epistemology, Mind, Ethics
Notable ideas	direct realism, proper functionalism (later popularized by Alvin Plantinga)
Influenced by Hume, Cicero, Aquinas, Berkeley
Influenced Cousin, Plantinga, C.S. Peirce, Moore, Alston, James, Hartley

The Reverend Thomas Reid FRSE (/riːd/; 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. ^[1]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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^[2]

Thomas Reid's theory of common sense[link]

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.^[3] 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"^[4] (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 because of the attention given to Reid by contemporary philosophers, in particular philosophers of religion in the school of Reformed epistemology such as William Alston,^[5] Alvin Plantinga, and Nicholas Wolterstorff,^[6] 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:

Thomas Reid's excellent book, Inquiry into the Human Mind... affords us a very thorough conviction of the inadequacy of the senses for producing the objective perception of things, and also of the non-empirical origin of the intuition of space and time. Reid refutes Locke's teaching that perception is a product of the senses. This he does by a thorough and acute demonstration that the collective sensations of the senses do not bear the least resemblance to the world known through perception, and in particular by showing that Locke's five primary qualities (extension, figure, solidity, movement, number) cannot possibly be supplied to us by any sensation of the senses...

— The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, Ch. 2

Other philosophical positions[link]

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.^[7] 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.^[8]

See also[link]

• Philosophy of perception

Reid's works[link]

• 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[link]

• 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 0-8264-8809-9
• 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[link]

External links[link]

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Reid, Thomas.

• The Reid Project at the University of Aberdeen.
• Thomas Reid entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind, Essays on the Active Powers..., and Essays on the Intellectual powers..., slightly modified for easier reading.
• Reid @ Google Books
• The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid – critical edition of Reid's philosophical treatises and previously unpublished materials

Thomas Allan Reid (born June 24, 1946 in Fort Erie, Ontario) is a retired professional ice hockey player who played 690 games in the National Hockey League. He played for the Chicago Black Hawks and Minnesota North Stars over an 11 year career.

Playing career[link]

Not known as a goal scorer, perhaps Reid's best known accomplishment as a player was scoring a rare penalty shot goal on October 14, 1971 against Ken Dryden of the Montreal Canadiens.^[1] It was the only penalty shot ever scored against Dryden and one of only 17 goals that Reid scored in his career. Reid retired in 1978 after contracting an unusual rash caused by his hockey equipment.

Broadcasting[link]

After retiring as a player, Reid spent 12 years as color analyst for the North Stars. After the team's move to Dallas, Reid continued as an analyst for NCAA hockey. He and Bob Kurtz have been part of the radio broadcast team for the Minnesota Wild since the team's inaugural season in 2000.

External links[link]

• Tom Reid's career stats at The Internet Hockey Database
• Tom Reid bio

References[link]

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This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (April 2009)

Joe South (born Joseph Alfred Souter, February 28, 1940, in Atlanta, Georgia) is a multi-talented American singer-songwriter and guitarist.

Career[link]

South opened his pop career in July 1958 with the novelty hit "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor". Thereafter South's music grew increasingly serious.

In 1959, South wrote two songs which were recorded by Gene Vincent: "I Might Have Known", which was on the album Sounds Like Gene Vincent (Capitol Records, 1959) and "Gone Gone Gone" which was included on the album The Crazy Beat of Gene Vincent (Capitol Records, 1963).

He had met and was encouraged by Bill Lowery,^{[citation needed]} an Atlanta music publisher and radio personality. He began his recording career in Atlanta with National Recording Corporation, where he served as staff guitarist along with other NRC artists Ray Stevens and Jerry Reed. South's earliest recordings have been re-released by NRC on CD.

South was also a prominent sideman, playing guitar on Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools",^[1] Tommy Roe's "Sheila", and Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde album. Some list South on the electric guitar part that was added to Simon & Garfunkel's first hit, "The Sounds of Silence", although others credit Al Gorgoni and/or Vinnie Bell instead.

Responding to late 1960s issues, South's style changed radically, most evident in his biggest single, 1969's pungent, no-nonsense "Games People Play" (purportedly inspired by Dr. Eric Berne's book), a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Accompanied by a lush string sound, an organ, and brass, the production won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Song and the Grammy Award for Song of the Year. South followed up with "Birds Of A Feather" (originally "Bubbled Under" at #106 on February 10–17, 1968, more successful as a cover by The Raiders that peaked on the Hot 100 at #23 on October 23–30, 1971) and two other soul-searchers, the back-to-nature "Don't It Make You Want To Go Home" (also covered eight months later by Brook Benton With The Dixie Flyers) and the socially provocative "Walk A Mile In My Shoes" (also covered by Elvis Presley in a Las-Vegas era version, Bryan Ferry, and Coldcut).

South's compositions have been recorded by many other artists as well, including Billy Joe Royal's songs "Down in the Boondocks", "I Knew You When", "Yo-Yo" (later a hit for the Osmonds), and "Hush" (later a hit for Deep Purple and Kula Shaker). South's most commercially successful composition is Lynn Anderson's 1971 country/pop monster hit "(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden", which was a hit in 16 countries worldwide and translated into many languages. Anderson won a Grammy Award for her vocals, and South won a Grammy Award for writing the song. South would go on to write more hits for Anderson, such as "How Can I Unlove You" (Billboard Country #1) and "Fool Me" (Billboard Country #3).

The 1971 suicide of his brother, Tommy, drove South into a deep depression.^[2] Tommy had been his backing band's drummer and accompanied South not only in live performances but also on recording sessions when South produced hits for other artists, including Royal, Sandy Posey, and Friend and Lover.

South was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1979.

In 1988 Dutch DJ Jan Donkers interviewed South for VPRO-radio. The radio show^[3] that aired the interview also played four new songs by South, but a new record was not released.

On September 13, 2003 South was inducted into Georgia Music Hall of Fame and played together with Buddy Buie, James B. Cobb, Jr. and Chips Moman at the induction ceremony.

Discography[link]

Albums[link]

Singles[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Joe South at Allmusic
• Nashvillesongwriters Foundation

Curtis Paul Stevens (June 1, 1898 – May 15, 1979) was an American bobsledder who competed in the 1930s. He won the gold medal in the two-man event at the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid.

The national champion for bobsleigh in the two-man event is named in Stevens' honor. He died in Lake Placid, New York.

References[link]

• 2007 bobsleigh results from Lake Placid featuring Stevens.
• Bobsleigh two-man Olympic medalists 1932-56 and since 1964
• DatabaseOlympics.com profile

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This article about an American Winter Olympic medalist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e