Hume Studies

This rich and interesting book tells the story of the development and ultimate disappearance over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of a central theme in Scottish philosophy: common sense realism. Taking Thomas Reid's version of common sense realism as the paradigmatic form, McDermid shows how Reid's views had their roots in Lord Kames's account of perceptual realism, how Dugald Stewart and Sir William Hamilton defended and modified Reid's view, and how James Ferrier systematically repudiated both Reid's appeal to common sense and his realism. McDermid succeeds in providing a clear overview of the trajectory, while not losing sight of the details of the individual philosophers' views.

The book has three primary aims: to show that Kames, Reid, Stewart, Hamilton, and Ferrier are "members of a rich and underappreciated tradition" (1); to "re-conceptualize some of the achievements of Thomas Reid" by reading him as more than just a "footnote to Hume" (3); and to show that the five philosophers discussed in the book had a shared goal of "determining whether any form of perceptual realism is defensible" (1–2).

McDermid is careful not to reduce this claim of a thematic continuity among their works to the claim that they were all answering the same question. One result of this is a proliferation of labels for the philosophical positions under consideration: not just "common sense realism," but also "perceptual realism" (57), "generic realism" (151), "natural realism" (159, 193), and "metaphysical realism" (190). While it is a virtue of McDermid's work that he does not try to force all the views into one framework, more explicit discussions of how these labels relate to each other, or at least ensuring that all of the terms occur in the index, might have been useful.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by clarifying what McDermid means by "common sense philosophy," focusing on Reid and drawing comparisons with the works of James Oswald, James Beattie, and George Campbell. McDermid argues that Reid's "common-sensism" is a response not just to skepticism generally, but to four forms of skepticism: epistemological, metaphysical, moral, and religious (11). He offers a broad overview of Reid's account of the principles of common sense, drawing primarily on Nicholas Wolsterstorff's 2001 book, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology, and a clear account of why Reid thinks these principles help rebut the various forms of skepticism. Oswald, Beattie, and Campbell are offered as variations on the Reidian theme, and the chapter ends with a list of eleven [End Page 107] "themes and theses" (43) of common sense philosophy that can be distilled from the works of these four philosophers.

Chapter 2 is a relatively brief account of Lord Kames as "the de facto founder of the Scottish common sense realist tradition" (57). McDermid draws on Kames' 1751 edition of Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion to emphasize three main themes: the centrality of appeals to "natural feeling or perception" (57) in Kames's metaphysics and epistemology; the role of Kames's claim that our sense-perceptions are basically reliable under standard conditions in rebutting skepticism; and the role of Kames's claim that we immediately perceive material objects in his rebuttal of Berkeley. Kames's work has received little attention, so this is a useful contribution to the secondary literature on Scottish philosophy.

Chapter 3 lays out Reid's common sense realism, which in the briefest possible terms is the view that "the existence of the material world is self-evident or non-inferentially justified for us" (73). McDermid usefully positions Reid against Descartes throughout the chapter, surveying Reid's account of Descartes's role in changing how philosophers thought about first principles and the external world, contrasting Descartes's "minimalist" epistemological substructure (78) with Reid's much more expansive account of first principles, and contrasting the two philosophers' solutions to the problem of our knowledge of the external world...