Self and Intersubjectivity

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-74
Author(s):  
Tim Milnes

This chapter argues that Ciceronian, ‘Academic’ scepticism provides a model for Hume’s attempts to harmonise rationality and sentiment. It enables Hume to engage in the language game of reader participation through which essayists such as Addison and Steele had already begun to model a sociable public sphere. Hume’s conversion from ‘difficult’ to ‘easy’ empiricism is connected to a broader tension within Enlightenment thought between the value systems associated respectively with modern Newtonian science and classical ideas of virtue and eudemonia. While Hume bases judgement upon feelings rooted in custom and habit, common-sense thinkers such as Thomas Reid ground it in a form of intuition that is philosophically foundational. Cutting across this difference, however, is a shared belief that society underpins rationality. In Hume’s ‘intercourse of sentiments’, Reid’s ‘prescience’ and Stewart’s notion of the ‘stamina’ of intellect, sociability, conversation, association, and correspondence become the natural and social conditions of meaningful thought.

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Mark Boespflug
Keyword(s):  

The common sense that heavily informs the epistemology of Thomas Reid has been recently hailed as instructive with regard to some of the most fundamental issues in epistemology by a burgeoning segment of analytic epistemologists. These admirers of Reid may be called dogmatists. I highlight three ways in which Reid's approach has been a model to be imitated in the estimation of dogmatists. First, common sense propositions are taken to be the benchmarks of epistemology inasmuch as they constitute paradigm cases of knowledge. Second, dogmatists follow Reid in taking common sense propositions to provide boundaries for philosophical theorizing. Inasmuch as philosophical theorizing leads one to deny a common sense proposition, such theorizing is stepping outside of the bounds of what it can or should do. Third, dogmatists follow Reid in focusing heavily on the problem of skepticism and by responding to it by refusing to answer the demand for a meta-justification that the skeptic wants.


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Barrantes ◽  
Juan M. Durán

We argue that there is no tension between Reid's description of science and his claim that science is based on the principles of common sense. For Reid, science is rooted in common sense since it is based on the (common sense) idea that fixed laws govern nature. This, however, does not contradict his view that the scientific notions of causation and explanation are fundamentally different from their common sense counterparts. After discussing these points, we dispute with Cobb's ( Cobb 2010 ) and Benbaji's ( Benbaji 2003 ) interpretations of Reid's views on causation and explanation. Finally, we present Reid's views from the perspective of the contemporary debate on scientific explanation.


2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Lundestad

Even though the philosophy of common sense is not justifi able as such, the assump- tion upon which it rests, namely that there are things which we are not in position to doubt is correct. The reason why Thomas Reid was unable to bring this assumption out in a justifi able manner is that his views, both on knowledge and nature, are to be considered dogmatic. American pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey on the other hand, may be seen as offering us a ‘critical’ and post-Darwinian philosophy of common sense.


Author(s):  
Paul B. Wood

Although the rise of Scottish common sense philosophy was one of the most important intellectual developments of the Enlightenment, significant gaps remain in our understanding of the reception of Scottish common sense philosophy in the Atlantic world during the second half of the eighteenth century. This chapter focuses on the British context in the period 1764–93, and examines published responses to James Oswald, James Beattie, and, especially, Thomas Reid. The chapter contextualizes the polemics of Joseph Priestley against the three Scots and argues that it was Joseph Berington rather than Priestley who was the first critic to claim that the appeal to common sense was the defining feature of “the Scotch school” of philosophy. It also shows that Reid was widely acknowledged to be the founder and most accomplished exponent of the “school”, whereas Beattie and Oswald were typically dismissed as being derivative thinkers.


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 29-41
Author(s):  
Piotr Zbróg

The beginnings of the shaping of social representations of borrowings in the public sphereThe article presents an initial phase of the process of shaping of social representations of borrowings. The aim was to obtain a view of the way in which participants of the public sphere talked about these elements of language, how they perceived them as well as what common sense image was created on this basis in the communication sphere and how it was modified. The first judgements and opinions on the matter of foreign words appeared around the 16th century and evolved from that moment. The theory of social representations developed by Serge Moscovici was applied as a theoretical and methodological basis of the description. Its research tools allow us to see the way in which societies construct meanings of matters important to them. On the basis of the analysis of the material it was established that from the beginning there were rather antagonistic elements of social representations of borrowings. The functionality of borrowings was noticed. Yet it was postulated that they should be eliminated from texts on account of the necessity to develop the native language, the incomprehensibility of statements as well as the excessive trend of foreignness.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
José Hernández Prado

Este artículo presenta y comenta las consideraciones que Thomas Reid (1710-1796), principal exponente de la Escuela Escocesa del Sentido Común, hizo en torno al tema de los colores y de las «cualidades primarias» y «secundarias» en sus obras epistemológicas principales —An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, de 1764, y Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, de 1785—, y persigue mostrar que tales consideraciones fueron visionarias, muy críticas de la tendencia idealista de la filosofía moderna y, sobre todo, sensatas.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-208
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Kubacka

The aim of this article is to show the home as an emotional place. The sphere of social conditions, which has been neglected until recently, can help explain emotion as a social construct. Many researchers have pointed to the emotional dimension of the experience of the home and living practices. A home is a complex place, a conglomerate of three aspects: material, symbolic, and relational. The experience of domesticity can be considered to have multiple aspects and to be variable. Taking emotions into account enables a fuller understanding of the duality of household practices, in connection with both their “function” and their role in creating, recreating, and changing the rules of the social order. In this sense, a home is located between the private and public sphere, emotional authenticity and emotional work, freedom and control, socialization and de-socialization, everyday life and celebration.


2021 ◽  
pp. 145-161
Author(s):  
Paula Castro ◽  
Sonia Brondi ◽  
Alberta Contarello

This chapter discusses how social psychology can offer theoretical contributions for a better understanding of the relations between the institutional and public spheres and how this may impact change in ecological matters. First, it introduces the difference between natural and agreed—or chosen—limits to human action and draws on Sophocles’s Antigone to illustrate this and discuss how legitimacy has roots in the many heterogeneous values of the public sphere/consensual universe, while legality arises from the institutional/reified sphere. Recalling some empirical research in the area of social studies of sustainability, it then shows how a social representations perspective can help us understand the dynamic and interdependent relations between the institutional or reified sphere and the consensual or common sense universe—and their implications for social change and continuity.


Author(s):  
John J. Haldane

Ferrier represents the transition within nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy from the tradition of common-sense realism begun by Thomas Reid, the last major exponent of which was Ferrier’s mentor, Sir William Hamilton, to versions of idealism influenced by German philosophers, especially Hegel. Although he is largely forgotten, Ferrier merits study for at least two reasons. First, he had a role in importing Hegelian ideas into British thought; and second there are parallels between his arguments and those advanced by antirealist philosophers in the analytical tradition.


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