Reid, Thomas

(1710-96)

   The progenitor of Scottish 'Common-Sense philosophy', a form of realism, Reid launched a blistering attack on the 'Way of Ideas'. This is a notion developed in Descartes and Locke that views mental contents as internal representations of the external world. Reid saw this as placing a 'veil of ideas' between the mind and world that led naturally to Berkeley's idealism and Hume's scepticism. He developed a trenchant critique of the Way of Ideas in Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764). Later, in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), Reid develops a form of realism in which perceptions are the direct means by which we experience the world. Reid attacked Hume's scepticism as unliveable, and advocated instead the rationality of basic trust in our sense faculties. Through this Reid became a champion of common-sense intuitions, granting them legitimate philosophical status. His work had a great impact in nineteenth-century America, particularly among conservative theologians of the Princeton school, and has also been an important philosophical source for externalist epistemology and the Reformed epistemology of Plantinga and Wolterstorff.

   See epistemology; epistemology, Reformed; Hume, David; Plantinga, Alvin; Wolterstorff, Nicholas Paul

   Further reading: Lehrer 1989; Reid 2000 and 2002; Wolterstorff 2001