About Thomas Reid (1710-1796)
Reid was born near Aberdeen and educated at Marischal College. Initially influenced by Berkeley, his aversion to the implicit assumptions in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1739) turned him away from both Berkeley and Hume and toward the reformation of philosophy. His major work, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense was published in 1764, the year in which he accepted appointment as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.
In the Inquiry Reid expressed the basic intuitional postulate of the "common sense" philosophy on which the Scottish faculty psychology was to be built. Intuitions are natural tendencies to mental action, aspects of the fundamental constitution of the human mind that control the conscious experience of all human beings from birth. Since instincts require the presentation of proper objects with the aim of being called forth in mental action, the Scottish philosophy is pragmatism. Intuitions do not project the mind into reality; they allow the mind access to it. While intuitionalism is a nativism of psychological process, it is a practical empiricism in that inquiry into the nature and existence of natively given principles of mind takes place by initiation from experiential facts in self-consciousness.
It was this view, coupled with Reid's (1785,1788) later analysis of specific faculties that engaged 19th century academic American mental philosophy. It was also ultimately from Reid that Gall obtained the original list of 27 powers of the mind that guided his attempt to map the localization of function in the brain. As Scottish philosophy of the 18th century is studies at length Scottish philosophy is overlooked to the point of being practically unknown. Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Thomas Reid are few names familiar to almost all philosophers.
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