The activities of the Field Day Theatre Company must be seen against the backdrop of the communal violence which preoccupied people in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1999, when power-sharing arrangements took effect. More than 3,300 people died in the course of this protracted struggle between the more extreme factions of the unionists (mostly Protestant), who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the nationalists (mostly Catholic), who favour some sort of united Ireland. The questions of whether and how to deal with the 'Troubles' worried artists in every medium and genre throughout this unsettled period in Northern Ireland. Failure to confront the atrocities left one open to the charge of ignoring the most vital, dramatic subject matter available.On the other hand focusing too exclusively on current events might make one's art ephemeral while raising suspicions that one was cashing in on the crisis or exploiting other people's pain for personal benefit. Field Day, founded in 1980, represented an attempt by six Northern artists and intellectuals – Brian Friel, Stephen Rea, Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, David Hammond and Tom Paulin – to respond to the unsettled political situation in the Province in a manner which seemed to them socially, morally and creatively responsible. The company has now been in existence for more than twenty years, and its legacy includes, in addition to its solid record of theatre production, publications which have set the terms for critical debate in Irish Studies through much of that time. This chapter, however, will focus mainly on the drama produced by Field Day and on its life and achievement as a theatre company.

'All women are exiles' says the playwright and critic Hélène Cixous. Since James Joyce named exile as one of the conditions of his artistic life it has become associated with Irish writing. The distance exile implies invites an association, in turn, with alienation. However, Seamus Deane argues that while modern Irish literature as a whole 'registers alienation, it is not a literature of alienation'. This comment has a particular resonance for Irish women's writing, and for women playwrights. If women are, as Cixous suggests, already exiles in their own land, how does alienation characterize their work; how might their work be a literature of alienation? The boundaries around Irish women's realities define containment as a form of exile: exile from self-expression, from self-determination. Only the crossing of a boundary makes that boundary visible. How does the work of Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr cross boundaries, and how do those crossings take shape in performance?

Irish plays by women in the 1930s reflect a high register of female alienation which is most thoroughly expressed in the work of Teresa Deevy. Deevy’s plays register alienation; but, in the sense that they form a corpus of work expressive of an occluded reality, kept out of the canon of Irish theatrical history, they are also a dramaturgy of alienation. In contemporary Irish theatre the work of Marina Carr pushes the boundaries of theatrical representation to the limit before crossing them to reveal a passionate enactment of exile and alienation.

When Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren can convince the Irish Times (19 July 1997) that he is planning a film with Steven Spielberg about how Wilde discovered rock 'n' roll in the United States, it is clear that his name has acquired a resonance and currency which even Oscar would have been surprised by. 'Wilde' is now a pop-cultural icon, a multiform signifier of youth, rebelliousness, individualism, sexual freedom, modernity. Indeed the commemorative industry surrounding the centenary of his death in 2000 resolutely commodified him as such: his image is now almost endlessly reproduced on playing cards, ties, T-shirts, mousemats and fridge magnets.

This relocation ofWilde among the ephemera of a supersophisticated consumer culture has been accompanied by an efflorescence of academic interest. Writing in the 1930s Wyndham Lewis dismissed Wilde as a ‘fat Dublin buffoon’, frozen into a posture of adolescent refusal and revolt: an historical curio who could be consigned to the snobbish ‘Naughty Nineties’. These remarks represent the nadir of Wilde’s critical reputation, while Christopher Nassaar’s Into the Demon Universe (1974) marks the beginning of a thorough and almost exclusively favourable reassessment of his writing.

The film Mise Éire (1959) was produced at a time of profound cultural change in the Republic of Ireland. Eamon de Valera was about to relinquish executive office to his successor as leader of Fianna Fáil, Sean Lemass. Lemass, with T. K. Whitaker, was embarked on the First Programme for Economic Expansion, the economic logic of Fianna Fáil's abandonment of republican nationalism. In place of an All-Ireland national unity – that grail of the Lemass/de Valera generation – would come a new compact with capitalism itself. The nation would be fulfilled not in the achievement of a complete independence, but in an alignment with global capital. Needless to say, this pragmatism was not publicly promulgated in so many words. It had, however, long been available to consciousness at the lived level of individual, family and class experience.

Mise Éire’s triumphalist account of Irish nationalist progression amounted to an almost unchallengeable hegemonic narrative until Northern Ireland exploded in ‘The Troubles’ of 1969. The film contains one sequence which is of particular interest to a discussion of contemporary Irish theatre. A hoist camera pans across a city street crammed with heaving humanity assembled to greet the 1916 revolutionary Constance Markievicz, on her return in 1918 from incarceration in a British jail.

History can be a fickle judge. After enjoying enormous popularity in the United States, Great Britain, and France for almost one hundred years after his death, Thomas Reid (1710-96) disappeared from the philosophical canon. Reid's disappearance did not have the consequence that his thought failed to influence subsequent philosophers: One can discern, for example, distinctly Reidian themes and methodology at work in Moorean “ordinary language” philosophy. But it did mean that Reid made no appearance in the story that philosophers in the last century have told - and continue to tell - about the development of early modern philosophy. The basic shape of this story is familiar enough and goes something like this:I

Early modern philosophy was animated by two central worries: First, given its dismal history of disagreement and present state of faction, how could philosophy progress in the way and to the degree that the natural sciences had? And, second, how could traditional objects of philosophical inquiry such as free will, the soul, and God be fit into the world as described by the new science? The urgency of both these issues occasioned a crisis in modern philosophy. In their own way, and with varying degrees of success, rationalists such as Descartes and empiricists such as Hume grappled with these issues. But only in the figure of Immanuel Kant do we encounter a sustained and ingenious attempt to blend the rationalist and empiricist ways of addressing these problems.

It is fitting that one of the last pieces of philosophical writing to come from Reid's hand should bear the title “Of Power.” For the concept “power” lies at the foundation of Reid's account of agent-causation, which in turn is the central idea in his account of human freedom and responsibility. In this final piece of philosophizing on this subject, Reid begins by pointing out that: “Every voluntary exertion to produce an event implies a conception of the event, and some belief or hope that the exertion will be followed by it” (OP: 3). Accordingly, our willing (deciding) to take a walk in the woods implies our having a conception of our taking a walk in the woods and some belief or hope that an exertion of ours intended to bring that about will be followed by our taking a walk in the woods. Reid takes this claim of his to imply that a conception of power is antecedent to every deliberate act.

Does he think that the earliest exertions by an infant involve a conception of power? No. Reid thinks that our earliest exertions are instinctive, unaccompanied by a conception of some goal to be accomplished. It is only when experience teaches us that certain exertions are followed by certain events that we learn to make these exertions voluntarily and deliberately in order to produce such an event. And once we believe that the event depends upon our exertion, we then have “the conception of power in ourselves to produce the event” (ibid.). Reid therefore concludes that our conception of power “is the fruit of experience and not innate” (ibid.).

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.