Thomas Reid 1710 – 1796

Thomas Reid was a Scottish philosopher and the founder of the Scottish school of Common Sense. He developed his philosophy in critical reaction to the empiricist tradition of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, arguing that their theory of ideas led inevitably to a skepticism that violated the convictions on which all human action depends. In their place he proposed that the basic principles of common sense are first principles delivered to us by the constitution of our nature and known immediately. His thought dominated Scottish and American academic philosophy through the nineteenth century.

Thomas Reid was born in 1710 at Strachan in Kincardineshire, the son of a Church of Scotland minister. He was educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen, served for a decade as a parish minister at New Machar, and in 1751 returned to Aberdeen as Regent of King's College. The collaborative philosophical society he founded there with George Campbell, John Gregory, and others — the 'Wise Club' — became the matrix of his first major book.

His Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764) appeared the year he was called to succeed Adam Smith in the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow. The Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and the Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788) followed in the long evening of his career. Together they argue against the way of ideas that Reid traced from Descartes through Locke, Berkeley, and Hume to the brink of skepticism, and in favor of an epistemology grounded in the deliverances of common sense.

Reid's philosophy of perception as direct, his realism about the external world, his agency-centered theory of the will, and his confidence in the testimony of the senses and of memory founded the Scottish school of common-sense philosophy that long remained influential in Britain, France, and America. His readers in the next century included Dugald Stewart, Sir William Hamilton, and the Princeton theologians, and his work has been recovered in recent decades as a major source for contemporary epistemology. He died at Glasgow in October 1796.