Abstract

Employing the faculty of perception marks the only possible means by which we can gather knowledge of our environment. Despite this, in roughly the century and a half leading up to Reid's Intellectual Powers, philosophers had widely turned from viewing this wondrous faculty as our companion in the quest for knowledge. Descartes, along with Galileo and Gassendi, begins a trend which, as Reid sees it, culminates in Hume. These thinkers, in increasing degrees, began to harbor a suspicion that our senses cannot be trusted with any epistemologically important responsibilities. This attitude was grounded upon a belief that the immediate objects of perceptual states are not external objects, but rather ideas and impressions. ;Reid argues that this doctrine, which he calls the 'Way of Ideas' and the 'Ideal Theory' was as philosophically feeble as it was popular. In the earliest parts of his philosophical career Reid found himself parry to a broadly Berkeleyan view of mind and world, but appreciating the implications of Hume's theories revealed to Reid the error of his ways. From that point onward, Reid takes it upon himself to rehabilitate the study of perception in order to show that, contrary to the Way of Ideas, we---that is, both philosophers and non-philosophers---have knowledge of our environments. This includes not only knowledge that there is an external world, but specific knowledge of some of its contents. While the origins of Reid's interest in the study of perception are perhaps more complicated than they seem, the importance of his work is quite clear, particularly in the face of revivals of the Way of Ideas in contemporary work on both cognition and perception. ;The purpose of this work is to systematically present Reid's theory of the mind and its relation to the world. I intend to make clear Reid's differences with his predecessors about the nature of thought, the structure of the process of perception and about perceptual learning