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Lehrer Reading Reid*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

D. D. Todd
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University

Extract

Lehrer's “reason for writing this book is that the philosophy of Thomas Reid is widely unread, while the combination of soundness and creativity of his work is unexcelled.” The book contributes to the ongoing Reid revival. Chapter 1 presents an overview of Reid's life and works and the last, Chapter 15, gives Lehrer's appraisal of Reid's philosophy. Chapter 2, “Beyond Impressions and Ideas,” outlines Reid's “refutation of what he called the Ideal System” of impressions and ideas that dominated philosophy from Descartes through Hume, and summarizes Reid's theory of the mind. The remaining chapters conduct the reader through the three books Reid published during his lifetime. There are three chapters covering the Inquiry of the Human Mind (1764), five on the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), a chapter comparing Reid on conception and evidence in the Inquiry and the Essays, and three chapters on Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788). The index is helpful despite occasional references to a page number larger than the number of pages. The bibliography is generally good, although, oddly, Lehrer lists the inaccessible 1937 Latin edition of Reid's important Philosophical Orations and not the English translation published by the Philosophy Research Archives in 1977 and republished by the Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series early in 1989. The text is remarkably free of typographical errors, but on p. 130 Putnam's 1973 article, “Meaning and Reference,” is said to have been published in 1983.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1991

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References

Notes

1 Cf. Immerwahr, John, “The Development of Reid's Realism,” The Monist, 61, 2 (April 1978): 245–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I do not agree with Immerwahr's views, but they are not negligible.

2 This argument may not be open to Reid, however, since he argues that we have clear and distinct conceptions of hardness, softness, smoothness, roughness and extension and can distinguish each of these from the others using only the language of the basic primitives of physics and geometry, without reference to the special sensations to which concept empiricism supposes them to be semantically tied. Moreover the conception of extension can be given to us by the very same sensations that give us hardness, softness, roughness, smoothness, and figures or motion. It is difficult to see how the notion of a semantic tie between objects, sensations, and concepts can be illuminating here. Certainly the supposed semantic tie would have to be immensely complex.