Reid held that every sane human being who has emerged from infancy and is not severely impaired mentally shares in common with all other such human beings certain “principles of common sense,” as he called them. These principles, so he argued, lie at the foundation of our thought and practice.I

The claim proves interesting and challenging in its own right. However, it seems unlikely that Reid would ever have developed his doctrine of common sense had he not believed that these principles play an important and indispensable role in the practice of philosophy. The doctrine of common sense has its home, in Reid's thought, in his understanding of the limits of philosophical thought and in his radical picture of the task of the philosopher which emerges from that understanding.

The philosopher has no option but to join with the rest of humanity in conducting his thinking within the confines of common sense. He cannot lift himself above the herd. Philosophy “has no other root but the principles of common sense; it grows out of them, and draws its nourishment from them; severed from this root, its honours wither, its sap is dried up, it dies and rots” (IHM I.iv: 19). Philosophers now and then profess to reject the “principles which irresistibly govern the belief and conduct of all mankind in the common concerns of life” (IHM I.v: 21).

Around the time of Thomas Reid's death in October 1796, his contemporaries took stock of his accomplishments as a man of letters. One of the most challenging interpretations of Reid's life and career to appear came from the pen of his colleague, the Glasgow Professor of Mathematics, James Millar. Writing in an article devoted to the Gregory family (to which Reid was related), Millar commented that Reid was 'peculiarly distinguished by his abilities and proficiency in mathematical learning. The objects of literary pursuit are often directed by accidental occurrences. An apprehension of the bad consequences which might result from the philosophy of the late Mr. Hume, induced Dr. Reid to combat the doctrines of that eminent author. . . . But it is well known to Dr. Reid's literary acquaintance, that these exertions have not diminished the original bent of his genius, nor blunted the edge of his inclination for mathematical researches; which, at a very advanced age, he still continues to prosecute with a youthful attachment, and with unremitting assiduity.I

Millar’s portrait contrasts sharply with that found in what remains the most influential biography of Reid to date, Dugald Stewart’s Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid, first published in 1802.

Perception bulks large in Reid's published writings. Nearly all of the Inquiry into the Human Mind is devoted to it, with chapters allotted to each of the senses of Smelling, Hearing, Tasting, Touch, and Seeing. And in the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, by far the longest essay is Essay II, “Of the Powers we Have by Means of our External Senses” The main theme of this chapter is Reid's attack on the reigning “way of ideas” and his attempt to put in its place a direct realist theory of perception. Also covered are Reid's distinction between sensation and perception, his views on primary and secondary qualities, his nativism about our conceptions of hardness and extension, and his treatment of the phenomenon of acquired perception.

I. CRITIQUE OF THE THEORY OF IDEAS

Almost alone among the great modern philosophers, Reid sought to uphold a direct realist theory of perception. He repudiated the theory of ideas, the central tenet of which is that the object immediately present to the mind is never an external thing, but only an internal image, sense datum, representation, or (to use the most common eighteenth-century term) idea. Ideas were conceived of as mental entities that existed only as long as there was awareness of them. Some proponents of the theory of ideas (such as Descartes and Locke) were realists, conceiving of physical objects as things distinct from ideas that cause ideas of them to arise in our minds.

In this chapter Thomas Reid (1710-1796) will be placed in context, with the aim of providing a perspective from which his thoughts can be better understood. Attention will therefore be focused primarily on the swirl of ideas, philosophical, theological, and scientific, to which he was exposed. Intimately related to that swirl of ideas is the part played throughout Reid's life by the Kirk, Scotland's national church. His father, Lewis Reid (1676-1762), was a minister of the Kirk. Reid himself studied its theology at Marischal College, Aberdeen (1726-31), acted as a clerk of presbytery in the parish of Kincardine O'Neil (1732-3), and was parish minister (1737-51) in the parish of New Machar in Kincardineshire. Also, on several occasions he represented his university, first King's College, Aberdeen, and then Glasgow University, at the annual meeting of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the Kirk's parliament. Late in life he was also a founding member of the Glasgow Society of the Sons of Ministers of the Church of Scotland.I Reid’s views on religion and on the place of the Kirk in society were fully consistent with those of the Moderate party in the Kirk.2 And what may be termed his “religious demeanor” was likewise on the side of moderation, as is indicated by his description of the people of Glasgow who have a “gloomy, Ent<h>usiastical Cast” C: 38),3 and are “fanatical in their Religion,” though he continues in mitigation of their demeanor: “The Clergy encourage this fanaticism too much and find it the onely way to popularity.

Thomas Reid is justly famous for his critique of the metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology of his influential predecessors and overlapping contemporaries. Debate continues about the success of his critique, but the philosophical intelligence displayed in his dissection of the faults in “the way of ideas” common to such otherwise disparate thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Hume is beyond doubt. Indeed, Reid's critique is an exemplary piece of philosophical art in that it aims to detect a central flaw in the underpinnings of a great enterprise. It exhibits the “subtle but well balanced intellect” that was later praised by C. S. Peirce. But this very achievement has tended to obscure some of Reid's more positive contributions to philosophy. Of course, his defense of common sense and his elaboration of what it means have been subject to plenty of critical attention, but there are many other areas in which Reid developed creative and original positions that have been relatively neglected in the literature. In what follows, I shall expound and discuss one that has been largely ignored both in its general form and in its particular applications.

The idea in question is that of “the social operations of mind.” Reid develops this idea both in his Inquiry and in the Essays and deploys it in his discussion of a number of important topics, most notably those of promising and testimony.

This essay is a discussion of Reid's views on memory and the identity of persons through time. These topics are closely related, although there has been, and still is, a serious controversy about the exact nature of the relation. John Locke, on the one hand, made the case for what has come to be called the “Memory Theory of Personal Identity,” according to which the identity of persons through time is constituted by the memory that a person has of his or her past actions, experiences, and so forth. Thomas Reid, on the other hand, thought this was absurd, and argued for the thesis that the relation between memory and identity is simply of an evidential nature: Memory gives a person evidence that he or she is the same person as the person who did, or experienced some thing at some previous time.

The first section is a discussion of Reid’s views regarding memory as a source of knowledge, while the second considers his views on personal identity through time. In both sections, I will pay special attention to two features of Reid’s thought. The first feature is that there are, as Reid says, things that are “obvious and certain” with respect to memory and personal identity. Unlike Descartes, Reid doesn’t start by methodically doubting everything that seems obvious and certain. Rather, he endorses the principle that what seems obvious and certain is innocent until proven guilty. That is, what seems obvious and certain may legitimately be accepted as a starting point for philosophical reflection until it is shown that such acceptance is irrational, unjustified, or unwarranted. This endorsement is at least part of what makes Reid a common sense philosopher.

The organizing theme of Reid's Essays on the Active Powers concerns the nature of human agency - whether human agents are endowed with an active power, what constitutes its exercise, and so forth. There is, however, an important subtheme woven through the text, one that concerns the objectivity of morality, or what we nowadays call “moral realism.” My purpose in this essay is to examine several strands of Reid's version of moral realism. In particular, I want to consider four constituents of Reid's broadly realist view: Reid's moral ontology, his account of moral thought and discourse, his account of moral motivation, and his account of moral knowledge. Since each of these topics is of interest to contemporary philosophers, I shall also be concerned to relate Reid's thought on these matters with what recent Anglo-American moral philosophers have said about them.

I. MORAL ONTOLOGY

Sometimes what is deepest in a philosopher’s thought is not what receives the most attention from that philosopher. This is the case, I submit, with respect to Reid’s views concerning the moral realm. Although issues of moral ontology do not receive much explicit attention in Reid’s work, they are what lie deepest in his moral philosophy. It is Reid’s views on the nature of moral reality that ultimately shape his views on the nature of moral discourse, moral motivation, and moral epistemology. I propose, then, to start with Reid on moral ontology.

In a strictly literal sense, to say that a thought is “innate” is to claim that we are born with it. Reid was not concerned to claim that we have such thoughts. When discussing Locke's views on our knowledge of first principles he wrote: [Locke] endeavours to show, that axioms or intuitive truths are not innate. To this I agree. I maintain only, that when the understanding is ripe, and when we distinctly apprehend such truths, we immediately assent to them. (EIP VI.vii: 520)

This statement might seem to qualify Locke's rejection of innate principles, but it does not. Since a truth that is immediately assented to as soon as it is distinctly apprehended just is an intuitively evident truth, the statement claims no more than that there are intuitively evident truths, while allowing that our intuitions of these truths may not be “innate” in the sense of being inborn. Locke would not have disagreed with either point.

Yet there was a dispute between Locke and Reid, not made explicit in this passage. Locke thought that we intuit by inspecting ideas previously obtained from sensation or reflection and simply seeing that they stand in certain relations to one another. Reid was willing to countenance intuitions that are obtained in other ways than by discerning relations between “ideas” obtained from sensation or reflection. He was also willing to countenance types of thought that may not have fit comfortably under Locke’s notions of an idea of sensation or an idea of reflection. In so doing, Reid countenanced beliefs and thoughts that are innate in something other than the crude sense of having been inborn.

Reid tells us that his rejection of “the common theory of ideas” is the centerpiece of his reply to skepticism. He often writes, in fact, as if rejecting that theory is by itself sufficient to answer the skeptical arguments of Berkeley, Hume, and others. In this essay I will argue that Reid's reply to skepticism is more complex than Reid himself portrays it. While Reid's rejection of the theory of ideas clearly plays a central role in his reply to skepticism, it seems to me that this is only one important element of his reply, and not one that is sufficient to do the job all by itself. On the contrary, Reid's reply to the skeptic depends also on (a) Reid's own theory of perception, (b) his theory of evidence, and (c) an important aspect of Reid's methodology. In the sections that follow, I will discuss each of these elements of Reid's philosophy in turn. In addition to explicating Reid, I will also be defending him. That is, I will argue that, taken together, these four elements of Reid's philosophy constitute a successful reply to the skeptic.

I. REID'S REJECTION OF THE THEORY OF IDEAS

According to Reid, the theory of ideas is both necessary and sufficient for generating sweeping skeptical results. This means that any successful reply to skepticism requires rejecting the theory of ideas. In this section of the essay, I consider what Reid means by “the common theory of ideas,” and why he thinks the theory is so closely connected with skepticism. I also review some of Reid’s reasons for rejecting the theory.

I must begin by stating emphatically what my subject is not. My subject is not the aesthetics of Thomas Reid: It is his philosophy of art.

By “aesthetics” I understand that branch of philosophy that deals with a wide, not clearly demarcated range of familiar questions, among which are the subset of questions that have specifically to do with the nature of the fine arts, their relevant qualities, and our interactions with them either as artists, critics, or audience. Philosophers, since and beginning with Plato, have written in a philosophical vein about what we would recognize as art and the aesthetic. But for some well-known reasons that I will adduce in a moment, no philosopher, before the eighteenth century, can really be said to have had a philosophy of art. Furthermore, even in the eighteenth century, to have a philosophy of art was an uncommon thing. And if Reid did have one, it would put him in the company of a very small group, perhaps consisting only of Alexander Baumgarten and, of course, Immanuel Kant. It would put him in the company of the pioneer philosophers of art. That Reid was of this number – or, at least, that he came very close to being – is the argument of this chapter.

The philosophy of Thomas Reid has exercised an enormous influence on Western thought from the publication of his Inquiry in 1764 until the present day. Reid's thought appeared on the world stage as at once amenable to science, Christian beliefs, the rise of a modern public sphere, and democratic politics. Exercising its most profound impact in postrevolutionary France and America, it promised to combine progress and stability by establishing links between common sense experience and philosophical and scientific thought in an era of rapid sociopolitical, religious, and scientific change. Reidian thought, moreover, had a significant impact on the development of higher education in both countries and was an important undercurrent in the broad expanse of nineteenth-century intellectual culture, an undercurrent that fed and mingled with other streams of Enlightenment thought. And although an identifiable school of “common sense philosophy” began to wane around the middle of the nineteenth century, Reid’s thought proved to be a multivalent and fertile influence on subsequent philosophical developments in Britain, France, and America such as positivism and pragmatism. Reid’s impact in German-speaking lands was slight but worth considering, since it has been claimed that his thought was highly influential there, and Kantianism became an important alternative – and at times bedfellow – to it.

Thomas Reid was a Christian philosopher. He never wavered from his theism or Christian belief, and a temperate, sincere faith pervades his writing and his biography. Apparently orthodox in belief, he wasn't given to theological and ecclesiastical controversies, but he did have a life-long interest in what we now call philosophy of religion issues. From 1751 to 1780 Reid's lectures included the subject of natural theology, or what can be known about God apart from revelation. Reid's notes for these lectures are almost entirely lost, but several student transcriptions from his lectures at Glasgow University (1763-1780) survive.2

Reid is a unique anti-medieval early modern theist, perhaps the last great Newtonian theist. An admirer of Samuel Clarke and Joseph Butler, he combines the rationalistic apologetics of the early eighteenth century with an antispeculative bent and a keen eye for human psychology. He doesn’t hesitate to employ the tools of philosophy in matters of religion. We shouldn’t, he says, be led by “zeal for religion” to defame reason in a rush to exalt revelation (EAP IV.xi: 636a). In this way Calvinism and Bayle, he saw, paved the way for Hume and other critics of religion.3 Although he continually emphasizes the limits of human understanding, Reid insists that “Revelation was not intended to supersede, but to aid the use of our natural faculties” (EAP V.ii: 641b).

If we look at Brentano's publications, we quickly see that they cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from the experimental psychology of visual perception, through specialized studies on Aristotle and the juridical intricacies of Austrian marital law, to extra-scientific pieces about chess and riddles. In view of this unusual situation, it seems clear that Brentano must have exerted his undoubted and far-reaching philosophical influence almost exclusively through his lecture courses. Through those courses he attracted many gifted students, and they constituted a school whose members came to hold important chairs not only in Austria, but also in Germany. Although these students, in their publications, often refer to Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint published in 1874, they do so for the simple reason that his lecture courses were (and remained) unpublished and could not be quoted directly, and this was therefore the only published work which they could cite.

MENTAL AND PHYSICAL PHENOMENA

In this chapter, I will set out what I take to be the basic tenets of Franz Brentano's epistemology. This seemingly simple task is a crucial one because virtually every other aspect of Brentano's philosophy uses his epistemology as a starting point and is structured in the same way. As the title of his major published work, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, suggests, Brentano saw himself as an empiricist; his account of knowledge, belief and other epistemological concepts is therefore constructed from the building blocks, so to speak, of the phenomena of experience.

According to Brentano, these phenomena are of two kinds, mental and physical, and he believes all human experience is experience of one or other of these phenomena. So we first have to see how he differentiates between mental and physical phenomena, between the mental and the physical. He lays out this distinction in the first chapter of Book 2 of his Psychology, entitled “On the Distinction Between Mental and Physical Phenomena.” Brentano first surveys several ways of laying out the distinction between these two classes of experiential phenomena. He then enumerates examples of mental and physical phenomena, and then tries to find the defining characteristics of mental phenomena. He identifies several characteristics which he thinks all mental phenomena have and all physical phenomena lack. Far and away the most important of these in his estimation, and the one which has aroused the most interest on the part of later philosophers, is what he calls “intentional inexistence.”

INTRODUCTION

Brentano's writings on the philosophy of mind or descriptive psychology have a number of distinctive features, all of which are connected with his understanding of what a part of theoretical philosophy is and ought to be, with his understanding of the relation between the philosophy of mind and experimental psychology, and with the success and thoroughness of his contribution to philosophy. First, his philosophy of mind always makes use of a carefully worked out ontological framework, indeed of at least two such frameworks. Secondly, he invariably argues at some length, sometimes at very great length, for his views. Thirdly, he often takes great pains to relate his views to those of the philosophical tradition, sometimes in order to argue against these views, sometimes in order to make clear just where he is building on the tradition and just where he is departing from it.

Brentano's theory of value, derived from his philosophical psychology, attempts to locate an objective basis for the intrinsic value of both aesthetic and ethical contemplation through the intentional objects of emotions and desires. As theories of intrinsic value, Brentano's aesthetics and ethics are concerned with what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly, pleasurable and displeasurable, in and of themselves, and not merely as a means to an end. As objective theories, Brentano presupposes that our aesthetic and ethical evaluations, like our judgments or beliefs, are either correct or incorrect. In what follows, we will set forth some of the basic principles involved in Brentano's aesthetics and ethics and elucidate how Brentano attempted to provide a foundation for these disciplines using his descriptive psychology.