The Scottish philosopher, clergyman, and teacher Thomas Reid (1710-1796) originated the school of thought known as the philosophy of common sense.

Thomas Reid was the son of Lewis and Margaret Reid. He was born on April 26, 1710, at Strachan, Kincardineshire. Until he was 12 years old, he was educated at home and in the local parish school; he then entered Marischal College, from which he graduated in 1726. During the next decade he studied theology and read widely, and in 1737 he became a Presbyterian minister of the Church of Scotland. In 1740 Reid married his cousin Elizabeth Reid, and during their long life together they raised nine children. In 1752 he gave up his ministry at New Machar to become a professor of philosophy at King's College, Aberdeen. His best-known work, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), was derived essentially from material he had presented to the local philosophical society, which he had established.

Although David Hume claimed that his own major work, A Treatise on Human Nature (1739), "fell stillborn from the press," Reid seems to have been one of its few original readers. The two Scots, who were contemporaries, conducted an infrequent but complimentary correspondence, and Reid wrote, "I shall always avow myself as your disciple in metaphysics." In 1753 Reid succeeded Adam Smith, the famous economist, as professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. He continued teaching until he retired at the age of 71. For the remaining 15 years of his life Reid published extensively. The two most important works of this period were Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788). Reid died on Oct. 7, 1796.

The philosophy of common sense took its point of departure from Hume's skepticism toward impressions and ideas. One of the chief tenets of modern classical philosophy is the representative theory of perception, which assumes that the immediate object of sensation is, in fact, a mental image that presents man with a world of material objects. Likewise, the relations between conceptual ideas are brought about by associations from past experience that are imaginatively projected into the future. Hume's skepticism led him to conclude that inferences on the basis of impressions and ideas are a matter of custom and belief rather than logical inference or demonstration. Reid's purpose was to reject such analysis as "shocking to common sense" and to rely on a description of the way in which perception, conception, and belief work together to produce an instinctive conviction of the validity of man's sensations of the external world and of other selves.

Further Reading

Renewed interest in Reid's work is evident in Timothy Duggon's edition of Reid's An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1970). It partially supplements The Works of Thomas Reid, edited by Sir William Hamilton (2 vols., 1846-1863). This collection also contains Dugald Stewart's Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid (1903). Studies of Reid include A. Campbell Fraser, Thomas Reid (1898), and Olin McKendree Jones, Empiricism and Intuitionism in Reid's Common Sense Philosophy (1927).

Additional Sources

Lehrer, Keith, Thomas Reid, London; New York: Routledge, 1991.

For more information on Thomas Reid, visit Britannica.com.

Reid, Thomas (1710-96) Scottish philosopher of common sense. Reid was born near Aberdeen and educated at Marischal College. After a period as a Presbyterian minister, he was appointed in 1751 to King's College, Aberdeen. In 1764 he took the chair of moral philosophy at the university of Glasgow. Reid's three important books are the Enquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), and Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788). Reid was the first serious philosopher to attack the British empiricist reliance on ‘ideas’ as satisfactory units on which to found a theory of knowledge and meaning. He regarded Berkeley, and especially Hume, as presenting a reductio ad absurdum of the approach to knowledge by the way of ideas. In his own approach, sensations of primary qualities of objects speak to us like words, affording us ‘natural signs’ of the qualities of things. The mind passes naturally over a word to consider what it signifies, and in like manner it passes over its own experience to consider directly the qualities they signify. This is so for ‘original perceptions’ of primary qualities; perceptions of secondary qualities have to be acquired. Reid's insight here has been recaptured in the 20th century in various kinds of direct realism. It enables him to defend the basic conceptual scheme of common sense against what he saw as the corrosive scepticism of Hume. For Reid, as for Moore later, the basic principles of common sense cannot be avoided or abandoned, although if we raise the question of their truth we can only appeal to divine harmony (he may not have been so far from Hume here as he supposed). Reid's influence persisted in the Scottish school of common-sense philosophy, and his phenomenological insights continue to attract modern attention.

1710–96, Scottish philosopher. He taught at King's College, Aberdeen, and at the Univ. of Glasgow. He is known as the founder of the common-sense school of philosophy, also known as the Scottish school, a group that had considerable influence in Great Britain and the United States during the 19th cent. Common sense is regarded as self-evident knowledge, the means by which we know the objects of the external world. These objects are known by us in their true sense and not as copies or ideas. This is the theory of natural realism, and it is the point of difference with the theories of John Locke. Reid based morality on conscience or moral sense, the ethical position of intuitionism. He had considerable influence on Dugald Stewart and Sir William Hamilton. His writings include An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), and Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788).

Bibliography

See his Philosophical Works, ed. with notes and supplementary dissertations by Sir William Hamilton (2 vol, 8th ed. 1895, repr. 1967); A. J. Ayer and R. Winch, ed., British Empirical Philosophers (1968); N. Daniels, Thomas Reid's Inquiry (1989); K. Lehrer, Thomas Reid (1989).

Quotes:

"Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion."

"There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words."

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)