Thomas Reid

Thomas Reid 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).

Reid, Thomas (1710–96), succeeded Adam Smith as professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow in 1764, largely through the influence of his patron Henry Home, Lord Kames. He published his first major work, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), and after retiring from active teaching at Glasgow in 1780 he published his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788). His lectures on the fine arts were first published in 1973. Reid was perhaps the most notable 18th-cent. exponent of the philosophy of common sense, by which phrase he meant both a faculty of the mind, and a set of incontrovertible beliefs implanted in the human mind by God. He also questioned the widely-held theory that the immediate objects of perception are ‘ideas’, arguing that we directly perceive external objects rather than mental representations of them. Aesthetic qualities he conceived either as intrinsic qualities of mind, or, derivatively, as the qualities of objects of design. He was a vigorous critic of the writings of Hume, and, later in life, J. Priestley, and he championed the inductive methods of F. Bacon and I. Newton.