Thomas Reid’s common sense philosophy of mind

Abstract

Thomas Reid’s philosophy is a philosophy of mind. The aim of his published works is to construct what he calls “a just system of the mind; that is, an enumeration of the original powers and laws of our constitution, and an explication from them of the various phenomena of human nature” (IHM I ii, 15). In Reid’s day, the “phenomena of human nature” to be explicated in the philosophy of mind were wide-ranging. “Pneumatology,” as the field was then known (EIP, 12), included “the Philosophy of the Mind and the Sciences that depend on it.” Reid was introduced to the subject in Aberdeen, where the subject was defined as follows: