Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 420-421 [Access article in PDF] Philip de Bary. Thomas Reid and Scepticism: His Reliabilist Response. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. xv + 203. Cloth, $90.00.Readers of Thomas Reid's An Inquiry into the Human Mind and his two Essays have long been puzzled by the philosophical purchase of his appeal to the principles of common sense. Writing in 1765, an anonymous correspondent in the Monthly Review complained that Reid's use of the term "common sense" lacked precision, while Joseph Priestley claimed in 1774 that in the Inquiry Reid referred to no fewer than thirteen principles of common sense. According to Priestley, this proliferation of what he called "independent, arbitrary, instinctive principles" demonstrated that Reid had failed to capture the simplicity inherent in human nature, and consequently that Reid's system had to be rejected for methodological as well as empirical reasons. Reid was then attacked by an unidentified English critic for having ostensibly plagiarized the writings of Claude Buffier, while Kant famously affirmed in the preface to the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Reid had completely missed the point of Humean scepticism, and that his invocation of common sense was little more than philosophical obfuscation. Further debate followed the publication of Reid's Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man in 1785, with reviewers in the English and Critical Review challenging his account of our power of judgement and of the first principles of human reasoning. Even Dugald Stewart believed that Reid's use of the term "common sense" was ambiguous, and opted to reformulate Reid's ideas in terms of what Stewart called the "fundamental laws of human belief." Both friend and foe alike, therefore, found Reid's notion of common sense problematic, and the critical discussion of this feature of his writings continued unabated throughout the nineteenth century.In Thomas Reid and Scepticism, Philip de Bary is largely silent about this earlier literature and engages with the body of commentary on Reid's common sense epistemology written in the latter half of the twentieth century by such philosophers as Roger Gallie, Louise Marcil-Lacoste, Keith Lehrer, and Daniel Schulthess. De Bary's starting point is of a piece with his approach to the history of philosophy, for in his introduction he tells us that he will keep "the main focus of the discussion on those aspects of Reid's philosophy for which some direct contemporary relevance can be claimed" (2). Consequently, his interpretation of Reid's writings is primarily orientated toward current epistemological debates and he more or less ignores the details of Reid's historical context and the long tradition of critical commentary sketched above. Indeed, de Bary is not overly concerned with niceties of history because he sets out to "do 'history of philosophy' as philosophy rather than as history" (2). While this review is not the place to discuss the coherence of the enterprise thus described in any depth, de Bary can be seen as constructing a false dichotomy between philosophical and historical analysis and as overlooking the point that the study of the history of philosophy requires a firm grasp of both historical context and the intellectual issues at hand. Moreover, it would seem that if we genuinely want to learn from history, then we need to understand the thoughts and actions of historical actors in their own [End Page 420] terms rather than simply project our own problems onto the past. This means that our readings of texts must be rooted in the knowledge of their contexts, otherwise we run the risk of anachronism or worse.Such general worries notwithstanding, Thomas Reid and Scepticism provides a useful introduction to some of the major themes in Reid's philosophical works. At his best, de Bary displays many of the same virtues as Reid as a thinker. He is by turns patient, clear, and insightful, and he has many interesting things to say, even if the historical ground of his interpretation of Reid is occasionally shaky. In the course of the book he...