Thomas Reid
Some basic beliefs, like that the outside world exists, are simply common sense – we cannot prove them, but we cannot live without them.
Placement
Founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense: against Hume he defended the first principles everyone must take for granted, such as the existence of the external world.
Key ideas
- Common sense
- Direct realism
- Critique of the “theory of ideas”
Influence
Influenced 1
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
influenced
Jacobi drew on Scottish common-sense philosophy, Reid’s included, for his realist thesis in David Hume (1787) that perception gives immediate certainty of things, as M. Kuehn has shown. F. H. Jacobi, David Hume über den Glauben (1787); M. Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800 (1987); G. di Giovanni, “Hume, Jacobi, and Common Sense” (1998)
Evidence: AI draft
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi › 1743–1819
Criticism
Criticizes 3
John Locke influenced by
influenced by
Reid kept Locke’s primary–secondary quality distinction but recast it: primary qualities are conceived directly, secondary only relatively (Essays on the Intellectual Powers, 1785). T. Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764); Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785); SEP “Thomas Reid”
Evidence: AI draft
criticised
With the ‘brave officer’ Reid argued that Locke’s memory criterion of personal identity breaks transitivity: the general would be and not be the flogged boy (Essays, 1785, III.6). T. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), III.6; J. Locke, Essay II.xxvii; SEP “Thomas Reid”
Evidence: AI draft
John Locke › 1632–1704
George Berkeley
criticised
Reid traced Berkeley’s denial of matter to the ‘ideal system’, the assumption that we perceive only ideas, which he rejected for common-sense direct realism (Inquiry, 1764). T. Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), Dedication, ch. I; Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), II.10; SEP “Thomas Reid”
Evidence: AI draft
George Berkeley › 1685–1753
David Hume
criticised
Reid argued that Hume’s scepticism follows from the theory of ideas and answered it with first principles of common sense (Inquiry into the Human Mind, 1764). T. Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), Dedication, chs. I and VII; SEP “Thomas Reid”
Evidence: AI draft
David Hume › 1711–1776
Works
The senses give us the world itself, not mere ideas – against the skepticism of Berkeley and Hume.
Position
Reid traced modern skepticism to one assumption shared by Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume: that the mind perceives only its own ideas, never things themselves. Give up this “theory of ideas”, he argued, and perception turns out to be a direct grasp of the external world. Some principles – that there is an outer world, that memory is broadly reliable, that other people have minds – are first principles of common sense that all reasoning presupposes and none can prove. Doubting them is not more rigorous, merely inconsistent. His work founded the Scottish School of Common Sense and has found new defenders in contemporary epistemology.
Life & context
Thomas Reid was born in 1710 at Strachan near Aberdeen, studied at Marischal College and served for years as a parish minister. In 1751 he became a professor at King’s College, Aberdeen, where he helped found a philosophical society that debated Hume’s work. In 1764 he succeeded Adam Smith in the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow. He died in Glasgow in 1796.
Further main works
- Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785)
- Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788)
Appears in
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