Analysis of Aristotle's Logic, with Remarks

by Thomas Reid

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1806 edition. Excerpt: ... a great help both to memory and judgment. As the philosopher's province includes all things, human and divine, that can be objects of inquiry, he is naturaHy led to attempt some general division like that of the Categories. And the invention of a division of this kind, which the speculative part of mankind acquiesced in for two thousand years, marks a superiority of genius in the inventor, whoever he was. Nor does it appear that the general divisions which, since the decline of the Peripatetic philosophy, have been substituted in place of the ten categories, are more perfect. Locke has reduced all things to three categories; viz. substances, modes, and relations. In this division, time, space, and number, three great objects of human thought, are omitted. The author of the Treatise of Human Nature has reduced all things to two categories, viz. ideas and impressions: a division which is very well adapted to his system, and which puts me in mind of another made by a very excellent mathematician in a printed thesis I have seen. In it the author, after a severe censure of the ten categories of the Peripatetics, maintains that there neither are nor can be more than two categories of things, viz. data and quanta. There are two ends that may be proposed by such divisions. The first is, to methodize or digest in order what a man actually knows. This is neither unimportant nor impracticable > and in proportion to the solidity and accuracy of a man's judgment, his divisions of the things he knows will be elegant and useful. The same subject may admit, and even require, various divisions, according to the different points of view from which we contemplate it: nor does it follow, that because one division is good, therefore another is naught. To...

167 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1806

About the author

The Reverend Thomas Reid FRSE, a religiously trained Scottish philosopher and a contemporary of David Hume, was the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense and played an integral role in the Scottish Enlightenment. The early part of his life was spent in Aberdeen, Scotland, where he created the 'Wise Club' (a literary-philosophical association) and graduated from the University of Aberdeen. He was given a professorship at King's College, Aberdeen in 1752, where he wrote An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (published in 1764). Shortly afterwards he was given the prestigious Professorship of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow when he was called to replace Adam Smith. He resigned from this position in 1781.

Reid believed that common sense (in a special philosophical sense of sensus communis) is, or at least should be, at the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He 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. By contrast, Reid claimed that the foundations upon which our sensus communis are built justify our belief that there is an external world.