Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

Abstract

Thomas Reid (1710–1796) was a philosopher who founded the Scottish school of 'common sense'. Much of Reid's work is a critique of his contemporary, David Hume (1711–1776), whose empiricism he rejects. In this work, written after Reid's appointment to a professorship at the university of Glasgow, and published in 1785, he turns his attention to ideas about perception, memory, conception, abstraction, judgement, reasoning and taste. He examines the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, arguing that 'when we find philosophers maintaining that there is no heat in the fire, nor colour in the rainbow … we may be apt to think the whole to be only a dream of fanciful men, who have entangled themselves in cobwebs spun out of their own brain'. Written by one of the Scottish Enlightenment's most important thinkers, this work brings to life the intellectual debates of the time.

Constraints on freely chosen action for moral robots: Consciousness and control

“…Citing a more contemporary source, Knobe and Nichols provide a highly relevant quote from Thomas Reid: "I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks, acts and suffers." [8] 3 . In any case, the difference between being conscious of oneself-as-agent is quite different than having a second or third-person view of oneself under a particular description.…”

John locke on personal identityFNx08

“…What I am remembering, then, insists Butler, are the experiences of a substance, namely, the same substance that constitutes me now. Thomas Reid was against Locke's memory theory and tried to reduce it to absurdity (Reid, 1785). He criticised his theories for several reasons.…”

Heidegger and Mind, Objects, and Virtue

“…Heidegger is not an idealist for whom to be is to be perceived; rather he defends something like Thomas Reid's 'common sense' view that scepticism about the 'external' world is not a problem. 26 The existence of the world is incontrovertible, not because it can be proved, but because we cannot stand outside it to prove or disprove it. Thus we speak intelligibly of the being of objects within the horizon of their phenomenal meaning, just as the peasant shoes in Van Gogh's otherwise blank canvas take their meaning from the implied, unstated environment of the wearer's life.…”