Lectures on Natural Theology

by Thomas Reid, Yusef M. Komunyakaa

Thomas Reid (1710-1796) was one of the principal philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. A colleague and friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, in 1764 Reid succeeded Smith to the University of Glasgow's Chair of Moral Philosophy. He is most famous for his work in epistemology, defending common sense (the exercise of our ordinary, inborn cognitive faculties) as the ultimate foundation of human knowledge.Reid was also an important contributor to the eighteenth-century debate on natural theology, that is, the inference from the evidence of purpose in nature to the existence and attributes of God. Although he never published a separate book on this subject, Reid did give regular lectures on natural theology at the University of Glasgow, of which several sets of student notes have survived. The notes edited, annotated, and published in this volume were from a student of Reid's who attended his natural theology lectures in the spring of 1780. These lectures have important implications for the history of discussions on the relation between natural science and theology, culminating in the modern Intelligent Design debate.The Lectures on Natural Theology were not included in the ten-volume Edinburgh Edition of Reid's collected works. Moreover, while two earlier editions of these lectures exist, both contain serious mistakes of transcription and annotation. For these reasons, this carefully revised edition of this important text fills an important gap in the literature.

129 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1780

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.