The controversy over the interpretative issue—is Thomas Reid a perceptual direct realist?—has recently had channelled into it a host of imaginative ideas about what direct perception truly means. Paradoxically enough, it is the apparent contradiction at the heart of his view of perception which keeps teasing us to review our concepts: time and again, Reid stresses that the very idea of any mental intermediaries implies scepticism, yet, nevertheless insists that sensations are signs of objects. But if sensory signs are not (...) mental intermediaries, what are they? Hasn't Reid merely swapped the common ‘sensation’ for the notorious ‘idea’, ending up with indirect realism?1 Current imaginative strategies answer negatively: Reid's sensory sign does not contradict direct perception, and those who think otherwise merely fail to understand what it means. (shrink)

Thomas Reid distinguished between natural and artificial language and argued that natural language has a very specific sort of priority over artificial language. This paper critically interprets Reid's discussion, extracts a Reidian explanatory argument for the priority of natural language, and places Reid's thought in the broad tradition of Cartesian linguistics.

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, five on the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 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. 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. (shrink)

The starting point of this paper is Thomas Reid's anti-skepticism: our knowledge of the external world is justified. The justificatory process, in his view, starts with and relies upon one of the main faculties of the human mind: perception. Reid's theory of perception has been thoroughly studied, but there are some missing links in the explanatory chain offered by the secondary literature. In particular, I will argue that we do not have a complete picture of the mechanism of perception of (...) bodies. The present paper, relying, in part, on a particular theory in psychology – the feature integration theory of attention – will make a contribution in this regard. (shrink)

This work attempts to show that the Scottish common sense philosophers Thomas Reid, James Oswald and James Beattie, had a substantial influence upon the development of German thought during the period of the late enlightenment. Their works were thoroughly reviewed in German philosophical journals and translated into German soon after they had appeared in English. Whether it was Mendelssohn, a rationalist, Lossius, a materialist, Feder, a sensationalist, Tetens, a critical empiricist, or Hamann and Jacobi, irrationalist philosophers of faith, important philosophers (...) read the Scots and found them relevant for the solution of their problems. The Scots were seen as not just opposing Hume's skepticism, but also as complementing his more positive tenets. The most important chapter of this work shows that even Kant, who in this regard is known only for his devastating criticism of the Scots, learned much from them. It is argued that the Scottish influence opens a new perspective for the understanding of the German enlightenment, revealing how central were the twin problems of idealism versus realism, on the one hand, and of philosophical justification versus mere descriptive metaphysics, on the other. (shrink)