Thomas Reid on Consciousness and the Constitution of the Mental

Thomas Reid often seems distant from other Scottish Enlightenment figures. While Hume, Hutcheson, Kames, and Smith wrestled with the nature of social progress, Reid was busy with natural philosophy and epistemology, stubbornly loyal to traditional religion and ethics, and out of touch with the heart of his own intellectual world. Or was he? I contend that Reid not only engaged the Scottish Enlightenment's concern for improvement, but, as a leading interpreter of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, he also developed a scheme to explain the progress of human knowledge. Pulling thoughts from across Reid's corpus, I identify four key features that Reid uses to distinguish mature sciences from prescientific arts and inquiries. Then, I compare and contrast this scheme with that of Thomas Kuhn in order to highlight the plausibility and originality of Reid's work.

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The Legacy of Reid's Common Sense in Analytic Epistemology

Journal of Scottish Philosophy ◽

10.3366/jsp.2019.0222 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 17 (1) ◽

pp. 23-37

Author(s):

Mark Boespflug

Keyword(s):

Common Sense ◽

Thomas Reid ◽

The Common

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.

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Thomas Reid on Causation and Scientific Explanation

Journal of Scottish Philosophy ◽

10.3366/jsp.2016.0113 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 14 (1) ◽

pp. 51-67 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Manuel Barrantes ◽

Juan M. Durán

Keyword(s):

Common Sense ◽

Scientific Explanation ◽

Thomas Reid ◽

Contemporary Debate ◽

The Common

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.

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Christopher A. Shrock, Thomas Reid and the Problem of Secondary Qualities

Journal of Scottish Philosophy ◽

10.3366/jsp.2018.0214 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 16 (3) ◽

pp. 286-292

Author(s):

Hannes Ole Matthiessen

Keyword(s):

Thomas Reid ◽

Secondary Qualities

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Thomas Reid's View of Memorial Conception

Journal of Scottish Philosophy ◽

10.3366/jsp.2018.0204 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 16 (3) ◽

pp. 211-226

Author(s):

Marina Folescu

Keyword(s):

External World ◽

Human Mind ◽

Thomas Reid ◽

Good Grasp

Thomas Reid believed that the human mind is well equipped, from infancy, to acquire knowledge of the external world, with all its objects, persons and events. There are three main faculties that are involved in the acquisition of knowledge: (original) perception, memory, and imagination. It is thought that we cannot understand how exactly perception works, unless we have a good grasp on Reid's notion of perceptual conception (i.e., of the conception employed in perception). The present paper argues that the same is true of memory, and it offers an answer to the question: what type of conception does it employ?

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The Skeptic and The Madman: The Proto‐Pragmatism of Thomas Reid

Journal of Scottish Philosophy ◽

10.3366/jsp.2006.4.2.125 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 4 (2) ◽

pp. 125-137 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Erik Lundestad

Keyword(s):

Common Sense ◽

John Dewey ◽

Charles Sanders Peirce ◽

The Other ◽

Thomas Reid ◽

Other Hand

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.

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