REID, THOMAS

Philosopher, founder of the scottish school of common sense; b. Strachan, near Aberdeen, April 26, 1710; d. Glasgow, Oct. 7, 1796. Reid was a professor at the University of Aberdeen from 1752 to 1764, when he succeeded Adam smith in the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow.

The method of observation and analysis limited to sensorial experience is typical of Reid and his school: the mind knows itself by observing and analyzing the various faculties and constitutive principles of man, in order not to go beyond phenomena and thereby to renounce explaining their origins (metaphysical agnosticism). The validity of sensible knowledge, the existence of the perceiving subject, and belief in the existence of external objects are all inexplicable yet basic principles of human nature. "The mind has a certain faculty of inspiration or suggestion … to which we are debtors for an infinite number of simple notions, which are neither impressions nor ideas, as well as for a good number of basic principles of belief" (Inquiry 2.7). Sensation and perception are basic acts of knowledge; through them man knows the primary (objective) and secondary (subjective) qualities of things. In perception, the immediate object of the mind is not the idea but the thing. Ideas do not exist, and to admit them is to accept the skeptical consequences of G. berkeley and D. hume that is, to deny matter, spiritual substance, and the principle of causality—truths made indisputable by common sense (Essays 2.9). Sensation is infallible and attests to the objectivity of the qualities existing in an object, the essence of which man does not know, since he cannot know material or spiritual substance; he knows only extension, motion, etc., which are neither ideas nor impressions, nor can they exist without something extended or moved. Perception, moreover, has immediate evidence, not demanding reasoning for its proof. Man perceives an object and immediately there arises in him the invincible belief that he and the object exist. All reasoning is based upon this belief, which is first and independent of reasoning. It is an innate suggestion that, not explaining anything because man cannot explain anything, makes him believe in everything and gives him confidence in his faculties, without which he cannot think or act. Common sense should not conform to philosophy, but the latter to the former.

Thus, Reid thought that he had resolved the problem about the objectivity of knowledge and reality against the idealists or impressionists. Yet, like I. kant, he made dogmatic assumptions and thereby hardly departed from Kant's apriority.

Bibliography: Works. An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (London 1764); Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh 1785); Essays on the Active Powers of Man (Edinburgh 1788). Literature. f. c. copleston, History of Philosophy (Westminister, Md. 1946–) v. 5, Hobbes to Hume (1959) 364–373. m. m. rossi, Enciclopedia filosofica, 4 v. (Venice-Rome 1957) 3:1928–35. m. f. sciacca, T. Reid (Brescia 1945); La filosofia di T. Reid (Naples 1935).

[m. f. sciacca]