Abstract

In this critical edition of An Inquiry Into the Human Mind, Reid’s classic eighteenth-century treatise in the philosophy of mind appears with supplementary manuscripts and correspondence which, along with a crack editing job, provide the context for a rich understanding of this work. Reid’s central concern in the Inquiry was to provide an alternative to the account of the mind handed down by the Cartesian tradition. Thus the book contains a considerable amount of polemical material. A main target is the representational theory of perception, which he took to be the essential though unproved foundation of Berkeley’s idealism and Hume’s skepticism. Also singled out for criticism are Locke’s view of truth and formulation of the primary/secondary quality distinction, Hume’s reduction of all mental content to impressions and ideas, and the inability of prior philosophers to distinguish sensations properly from the objects they signify. This last is where Reid believes that he has made an important advance. The inability to distinguish between sensation and body has been, according to Reid, a main source of philosophical confusion. The Aristotelian tradition missed the distinction entirely, but the moderns have only partially grasped it. Locke, for example, believed that some of our sensations, though not all, resemble objects. Reid’s contribution to the discussion is to make the distinction clearly and to recognize that none of our sensations do or could resemble bodies insofar as they are entirely different things. Here he agrees with Berkeley. Reid, however, retains material objects as a first principle. This, in conjunction with his rejection of the “theory of ideas” animating representationalism, leads Reid to formulate a realism which is neither naive nor which has any tendency to degenerate into the idealism of Berkeley or skepticism of Hume.