Thomas Reid
1) His Biography:
Thomas Reid (1710–1796), a Scottish philosopher, theologian, and educator, founded the philosophy of common sense school of thinking. The parents of Thomas Reid were Lewis and Margaret Reid. He was born in Strachan, Kincardineshire, on April 26, 1710. He received his education at home and in the neighbourhood parish school up until the age of twelve. After that, he enrolled in Marischal College, where he received his degree in 1726.
He read widely and studied theology for the following ten years before becoming a Presbyterian pastor of the Church of Scotland in 1737. Reid wed his cousin Elizabeth Reid in 1740, and they had nine kids together during the course of their lengthy union. He left his position as minister at New Machar in 1752 to take a position as a philosophy professor at King’s College in Aberdeen.
His most well-known work, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), was largely developed from the lectures he gave to the local philosophical club that he founded.
Reid appears to have been one of the book’s few original readers, notwithstanding David Hume’s assertion that his own major work, A Treatise on Human Nature (1739), “fell stillborn from the press.” Reid stated, “I shall always avow myself as your disciple in metaphysics,” in their infrequent but friendly contact. The two contemporary Scots. Adam Smith, a well-known economist, was followed as professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow in 1753 by Reid. He kept on instructing till he turned 71 and retired. Reid published a lot over the final 15 years of his life. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788) were the two most significant writings of this era. Reid died on Oct. 7, 1796.
2) Main Works:
Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense:
Reid held that all philosophical investigation should be based on common sense. He criticised the sceptical philosophy put forth by fellow Scotsman David Hume and Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley, who claimed that the outside world did not exist apart from the human intellect. Reid also criticised Locke and Descartes’ theory of ideas, asserting that it was inconsistent with empirical and physical truths. Reid argues that the external world must exist since our senses prove it, hence this book is divided into chapters that focus on each sense individually.
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man & Essays on the Active Powers of Man:
The most comprehensive and original articulation of the philosophy of Common Sense can be found in The Intellectual Powers and its companion publication, Essays on the Active Powers of Man. Reid discusses a wide range of influential thinkers during this process, but David Hume is given considerable attention. The self was a collection of perceived concepts, and the will as the basis of action was nothing more than the balancing act of emotional impulses, in Reid’s opinion, Hume had driven a profound trend in contemporary philosophy to its final consequences.
3) Main Themes:
Theory of Common Sense:
Reid’s theory of knowing had a significant impact on his morality theory. He believed that practical ethics began with epistemology because, when philosophy has validated our common ideas, all that is left to do is act morally because we already know what is right. His focus on the subject’s agency and self-control is reminiscent of Roman Stoicism, which is another influence on his moral philosophy. He frequently uses Cicero’s quotations, from whom he borrowed the phrase “sensus communis.” Reid’s response to Hume’s scepticism and naturalism was to identify a number of common sense (sensus communis) principles that serve as the cornerstones of logical thought.
The assumption that “I am talking to a real person” and “There is an external world whose laws do not change,” among many other positive, substantive statements, must be made by anybody who engages in a philosophical argument. For Reid, it is not logical to believe that these principles are true; rather, reason and the “constitution” of the human mind require these principles as prerequisites. Reid’s adherence to common sense principles act as a measure for sanity for this reason (as well as perhaps out of mockery for Hume and Berkeley). Reid also advanced persuasive cases based on phenomenological understanding to advance a fresh synthesis of direct realism and common language philosophy. In a typical paragraph from
The Intellectual Powers of Man, he claims that when he imagines a centaur, he imagines an animal, and no idea is an animal; as a result, what he imagines is a centaur and not an idea. This claim is supported by both an explanation of the subjective experience of imagining an object and an explanation of what words actually signify. Reid believed his philosophy to be information that anyone could acquire, both through introspection and through understanding how language should be utilised, he saw it as the philosophy of common sense.
Other Philosophical Positions:
Although Reid is most known for his epistemology, his views on the theory of action and the metaphysics of personal identity are also noteworthy. Reid advocated for an incompatibilist or libertarian understanding of freedom, contending that humans are capable of taking voluntary actions for which we bear moral responsibility. In terms of personal identity, he disagreed with Locke’s theory that a person’s continuity with their self over time is based on self-consciousness in the form of memory of their experiences. Reid believed that being the same person numerically at various points in time was neither required nor sufficient.
Reid further maintained that only a purposeful Creator could explain how our minds function, linking sensations with the belief in an outside reality. Reid offers five arguments for God’s existence in his lectures on natural religion, concentrating primarily on the cosmological and design arguments. Samuel Clarke’s cosmological argument, which states that since the cosmos either always existed or just recently came into being, there must be a cause (or first principle) for both, is one that Reid adores and regularly employs. An independent being is necessary for contingency because everything is either necessary or contingent.
Reid spends significantly more time on his design position, but it’s not quite obvious what he intended his position to be since his lectures were limited to what his students need. Reid claims that there are actually the clearest traces of purpose and wisdom in the works of nature, despite the fact that there is no ideal interpretation. Something must have been designed if it exhibits design characteristics, such as regularity or variation of structure . According to the incidental excellence principle, this cannot be learned by experience, but the cause can be recognised in natural works of art.
4) Hume vs Reid:
David Hume’s thought was consistently and sharply criticised by Thomas Reid. Reid argues that Hume’s theory is insufficient to explain how people think and believe. Hume’s theory has a flaw in that impressions and ideas are insufficient to explain human thought’s intentionality and the fact that thoughts have possible hypothetical objects. Furthermore, impressions and ideas fall short of explaining the reality of belief, particularly the reality of unpleasant belief. Reid acknowledges the brilliance of the endeavour to explain human conception and belief in terms of impressions and concepts.
He refers to Hume as the most perceptive metaphysician of our time and wrote in a letter that if Mr. Hume stopped writing, he and his friends in Aberdeen would have nothing to talk about. Reid adds, however, that brilliance, not a lack of it, is what produces incorrect philosophy. Reid is more than just a modus tollens opponent of Hume. Reid maintains that we need not give up hope of a better explanation, in contrast to G. E. Moore, who is willing to say that Hume’s theory cannot explain the facts. The aim of Reid’s philosophy is to provide a more superior theory.
Hume’s scepticism of impression and ideas served as the foundation for Reid’s philosophy of common sense. The representational theory of perception, which holds that the immediate object of experience is actually a mental image that presents man with a world of physical objects, is one of the central principles of modern classical philosophy. Similar associations from past experience that are imaginatively projected into the future create the relationships between conceptual notions.
Hume’s scepticism led him to the conclusion that inferences made in response to impressions and ideas are more a function of tradition and belief than of logic or demonstration. Reid sought to disprove such analysis as “shocking to common sense” and instead rely on an explanation of how perception, conception, and belief combine to create an instinctive conviction of the veracity of a person’s impressions of the outside world and of other selves.
5) His Influence:
As the founder of common sense philosophy, Reid is best known. He argues that reverting to common sense principles will aid in solving the issues brought on by the so-called “sceptical views” of his forebears, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. According to his argument, the “way of ideas” causes excessive uncertainty in the theory of knowledge. There can be no assurance in knowledge aimed toward the outside world if the only things that can be known directly and instantly are the contents of one’s mind. Reid thinks that this goes against the idea that people do not only know the contents of their minds, but also that they can learn certain things by empirical observation of the outside world.
Reid is most known today in the field of philosophy of mind for his arguments in favour of the theory of direct realism, which, at its most fundamental, holds that the primary objects of sense perception are physical objects rather than concepts in human minds. Reid’s view of the mind, however, does not start or finish with perception. He took on the challenge of proving the equal standing of the faculties of the mind and of describing the relationships that exist among them, in addition to advocating for direct reality and, thus, against “the way of ideas.”
In that he thinks that the mind should be described in terms of a faculty psychology, he is a deserving successor to Locke. He is a fitting successor to Newton since he thinks that studying the nature of mind using the scientific method is the best course to take. Reid defined the scientific method as primarily based on trial and error, the design of experiments, and the drawing of broad conclusions from those trials.
A traditional distinction between the “powers of the understanding” and the “powers of the will” serves as one of Reid’s philosophical cornerstones. Reid argues that this distinction is not entirely accurate because any act of will requires some level of understanding, and the mind is always engaged whenever the powers of understanding are used. Nevertheless, he uses it to divide the mental faculties into intellectual and active categories. Essays on the Intellectual Power of Man (1785) and Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788), which he saw as two sides of the same coin, are the names of his two major published works. Reid believed that any theory of the mind should include research into both categories of mental processes.
