Thomas Reid was a philosopher who founded the Scottish school of 'common sense'. Much of Reid's work is a critique of his contemporary, David Hume, 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. (shrink)

From the end of the Enlightenment to the middle of the twentieth century philosophy took fascinating and controversial paths whose relevance to contemporary post-modernist thought is becoming increasingly clear. This volume traces the English-language side of the period, while also taking into account those continental thinkers who deeply influenced twentieth-century English-language philosophy. The story begins with Reid, Coleridge, and Bentham - who set the agenda for much that followed - and continues with a portrait of the nineteenth century's greatest British (...) philosopher, John Stuart Mill. It then surveys the cross-currents of thought at the end of the century, including American pragmatism, a movement never more influential than now. Finally, it assesses two phases of what John Skorupski calls `analytic modernism' - the revolution against the idealism of Moore and Russell, and the Viennese sequel whose project was to show that philosophy consists of pseudo-problems. (shrink)

Here the distinguished philosopher Ian Hacking uses the MPD epidemic and its links with the contemporary concept of child abuse to scrutinize today's moral...

This book bears witness to the current reawakening of interest in Reid's philosophy. It first examines Reid's negative attack on the Way of Ideas, and finds him to be a devastating critic of his predecessors.

From the end of the Enlightenment to the middle of the twentieth century philosophy took fascinating and controversial paths whose relevance to contemporary post-modernist thought is becoming increasingly clear. This volume traces the English-language side of the period, while also taking into account those continental thinkers who deeply influenced twentieth-century English-language philosophy. The story begins with Reid, Coleridge, and Bentham - who set the agenda for much that followed - and continues with a portrait of the nineteenth century's greatest British (...) philosopher, John Stuart Mill. It then surveys the cross-currents of thought at the end of the century, including American pragmatism, a movement never more influential than now. Finally, it assesses two phases of what John Skorupski calls `analytic modernism' - the revolution against the idealism of Moore and Russell, and the Viennese sequel whose project was to show that philosophy consists of pseudo-problems. (shrink)

One of the great attractions of Thomas Reid's account of knowledge is that he attempted to avoid the alternative between skepticism and dogmatism. This attempt, however, faces serious problems. It is argued here that there is a pragmatist way out of the problems, and that there are even hints to this solution in Reid's writings.