31 Facts About Thomas Reid

Thomas Reid focused extensively on ethics, theory of action and philosophy of mind.

Thomas Reid was the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense and played an integral role in the Scottish Enlightenment.

Thomas Reid went to the University of Aberdeen in 1723 and graduated MA in 1726.

Thomas Reid was licensed to preach by the Church of Scotland in 1731 when he came of age.

Thomas Reid began his career as a minister of the Church of Scotland but ceased to be a minister when he was given a professorship at King's College, Aberdeen, in 1752.

Thomas Reid obtained his doctorate and wrote An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense.

Thomas Reid resigned from this position in 1781, after which he prepared his university lectures for publication in two books: Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man and Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind.

In 1740 Thomas Reid married his cousin Elizabeth, daughter of the London physician George Reid.

Thomas Reid was buried at Blackfriars Church in the grounds of Glasgow College and when the university moved to Gilmorehill in the west of Glasgow, his tombstone was inserted in the main building.

Thomas Reid believed that common sense is, or at least should be, at the foundation of all philosophical inquiry.

Thomas Reid disagreed with Hume, who asserted that we can never know what an external world consists of as our knowledge is limited to the ideas in the mind, and George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world is merely ideas in the mind.

Thomas Reid advocated direct realism, or common sense realism, and argued strongly against the Theory of Ideas advocated by John Locke, Rene Descartes, and nearly all Early Modern philosophers who came after them.

Thomas Reid had a great admiration for Hume and had a mutual friend send Hume an early manuscript of Reid's Inquiry.

Thomas Reid thought epistemology was an introductory part to practical ethics: When we are confirmed in our common beliefs by philosophy, all we have to do is to act according to them, because we know what is right.

Thomas Reid made positive arguments based in phenomenological insight to put forth a novel mixture of direct realism and ordinary language philosophy.

Thomas Reid saw language as based on an innate capacity pre-dating human consciousness, and acting as an instrument for that consciousness.

Thomas Reid looks to the way a child learns language, by imitating sounds, becoming aware of them long before it understands the meaning accorded to the various groups of sounds in the artificial state of contemporary adult speech.

For Thomas Reid, the perception of the child is different from the adult, and he states that man must become like a child to get past the artificial perception of the adult, which leads to Hume's view that what we perceive is an illusion.

Thomas Reid believes in direct objectivity, our senses guide us to what is right since we cannot trust our own thoughts.

Thomas Reid believes that Philosophy overcomplicates the question of what is real.

Thomas Reid believes that the philosophers of his time exaggerated what is truly real.

Thomas Reid claimed that this discovery of the link between the natural sign and the thing signified was the basis of natural philosophy and science, as proposed by Bacon in his radical method of discovery of the innate laws of nature:.

The work of Thomas Reid influenced the work of Noah Porter and James McCosh in the 19th century United States and is based upon the claim of universal principles of objective truth.

Thomas Reid wrote a number of important philosophical works, including Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man and Essays on the Active Powers of Man.

In 1844, Schopenhauer praised Thomas Reid for explaining that the perception of external objects does not result from the raw data that is received through the five senses:.

Thomas Reid refutes Locke's teaching that perception is a product of the senses.

Thomas Reid held an incompatibilist or libertarian notion of freedom, holding that we are capable of free actions of which we are the cause, and for which we are morally appraisable.

Thomas Reid held that continuity of memory was neither necessary nor sufficient to make one numerically the same person at different times.

Thomas Reid argued that the operation of our mind connecting sensations with belief in an external world is accounted for only by an intentional Creator.

Thomas Reid loves and frequently uses Samuel Clarke's cosmological argument, which says, in short that the universe either has always been, or began to exist, so there must be a cause for both.

Thomas Reid spends even more time on his design argument, but is unclear exactly what he wanted his argument to be, as his lectures only went as far as his students needed.