Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation: Papers Relating to the Life Sciences

The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid #1

by Thomas Reid, Paul Wood (Editor)

Thomas Reid (1710 - 1796) is best known as a moralist and as one of the founders of the Scottish Com mon Sense school of philosophy. He was also an influential scientific writer. This book is a study of Reid's most important papers on natural history, physiology and materialism. It surveys the extent of his scientific writings, illustrating the inter-relations between his scientific and philosophical thought, and redefines Reid's place within the Scottish Enlightenment. In a wider context, the book also raises questions about the role of science in the enlightened culture of 18th-century Scotland.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published December 15, 1995

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.