Great Ideas of Philosophy

Lecture Thirty-TwoThomas Reid and the Scottish SchoolScope: Hume’s most successful critic, Thomas Reid (1710–1796) laid the foundations for a “common sense”psychology based on the natural endowments by which we (and the animals) understand the world and actin it. His influence was broad and deep, reaching the leaders of thought at the American founding.Reid was the leading figure in a group of scholars and scientists at Aberdeen who were committed to thelarger Newtonian perspective and who would find in it evidence of a providential God. Admiring Hume,Reid examined his and Locke’s foundational assumptions and discovered them to be defective. Allknowledge is not mediated, Reed showed; the Lockean aggregate cannot account, logically or evidentially,for persons, nor can Humean hedonism account for the historical evidence of human altruism.OutlineI. Thomas Reid (1710–1796) has come down to us as the “Father of Common Sense Philosophy.” Until quiterecently, Reid was largely ignored, and only in the last 10 years has he been restored to a position ofphilosophical eminence.A. Reid’s contemporaries considered him an exceptional person.B. He studied for the ministry and held a position in the church at New Machar for a period of years beforeteaching at his alma mater, Marischal College, University of Aberdeen.C. Even before publication of his An Inquiry into the Human Mind, Reid was called to Glasgow to take theposition recently relinquished by Adam Smith.D. At Aberdeen, he founded what came to be called the Wise Club, which met every fortnight, engaged all themajor philosophical issues, wrote papers, and planned longer treatises. A number of the club’s productionsturned out to be important philosophically.E. In his Inquiry, Reid anticipated by a half century Reimann’s non-Euclidian geometry.F. Reid also was a master of the science of optics. On his mother’s side, he was related to the famousCambridge University Gregory family, known for work in optics and mathematics. Reid, too, wrote but didnot publish original work in mathematics and astronomy.G. His writings were widely respected in the United States where, in the years leading to and just followingthe founding, Scottish thought was profoundly influential.II. By common sense, Reid always referred to what was universally and pragmatically represented in nature,including human nature, as part of the “constitution” of the being in question, whether caterpillar or man.A. The principle of common sense, for Reid, does not mean the wisdom of the crowd. It doesn’t mean theprevailing opinions, the settled ethos of a given community.B. Rather, it is that which we are under an obligation to accept in all of the ordinary affairs of life. Reidillustrates the point with the “lowly caterpillar” that will crawl across a thousand leaves until it finds theone that’s right for its diet.III. At the core of Hume’s epistemology is the theory that all our knowledge is mediated. Hume, thus, continues along, almost uninterrupted philosophical tradition that says the eternal world comes to be represented in someway via mediation by the senses, a view with which Reid disagrees.A. These philosophers conclude that, because all our knowledge is filtered through our senses, we can neverknow the real world except by way of these representations.B. What results are “ideas” about the external world, but there is no way of determining the adequacy of suchideas as actual records or copies of the world.C. If this were so, then skepticism is entirely appropriate.©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 19