caption death_date death_place influenced era birth_place school_tradition influences main_interests notable_ideas birth_date image article_title name region
thomas reid 7 october 1796 glasgow , scotland hartley peirce , james , moore , alston , plantinga , , wolterstorff , chisholm , george davie , lehler , rowe ferrier , derose , bergmann , huemer , cousin , schopenhauer , c.s. 18th-century philosophy strachan , scotland scottish school of common sense , scottish enlightenment hume , cicero , aquinas , berkeley metaphysics , epistemology , philosophy of mind , ethics direct realism , epistemological externalism 26 april 1710 thomasreid.jpg thomas reid
 thomas reid western philosophy
thomas reid

thomas reid frse -lrb- ; 26 april 1710 -- 7 october 1796 -rrb- was a religiously trained scottish philosopher , a contemporary of david hume as well as `` hume 's earliest and fiercest critic . ''
he was the founder of the scottish school of common sense and played an integral role in the scottish enlightenment .
the early part of his life was spent in aberdeen and he graduated from the university of aberdeen .
he began his career as a minister of the church of scotland but ceased to be a minister -lrb- or called ` reverend ' -rrb- when he was given a professorship at king 's college , aberdeen in 1752 .
he obtained his doctorate and wrote `` an inquiry into the human mind on the principles of common sense '' -lrb- published in 1764 -rrb- .
he and his colleagues founded the ` aberdeen philosophical society ' which was popularly known as the ` wise club ' -lrb- a literary-philosophical association -rrb- .
shortly after the publication of his first book , he was given the prestigious professorship of moral philosophy at the university of glasgow when he was called to replace adam smith .
he resigned from this position in 1781 , after which he prepared his university lectures for publication in two books : `` essays on the intellectual powers of man '' -lrb- 1785 -rrb- and `` essays on the active powers of the human mind '' -lrb- 1788 -rrb- .
reid was buried at blackfriars church in the grounds of glasgow college and when the university moved to gilmorehill in the west of glasgow , his tombstone was inserted in the main building .
see separate article on thomas reid 's tombstone .
reid believed that common sense -lrb- in a special philosophical sense of `` sensus communis '' -rrb- is , or at least should be , at the foundation of all philosophical inquiry .
he disagreed with hume , who asserted that we can never know what an external world consists of as our knowledge is limited to the ideas in the mind , and george berkeley , who asserted that the external world is merely ideas in the mind .
by contrast , reid claimed that the foundations upon which our `` sensus communis '' are built justify our belief that there is an external world .
in his day and for some years into the 19th century , he was regarded as more important than hume .
he advocated direct realism , or common sense realism , and argued strongly against the theory of ideas advocated by john locke , rené descartes , and -lrb- in varying forms -rrb- nearly all early modern philosophers who came after them .
he had a great admiration for hume and had a mutual friend send hume an early manuscript of reid 's `` inquiry . ''
hume responded that the `` deeply philosophical '' work `` is wrote in a lively and entertaining matter , '' but that `` there seems to be some defect in method , '' and criticized reid for implying the presence of innate ideas .
