beauty

common sense

ethics

nationality

Scottish

occupation / innovator as

philosopher

innovator in the field of

commonsense realism

direct realism

philosophy

Scottish Enlightenment

librarian

British

mathematician

university teacher

religion

Protestantism

scientific organization

Royal Society of Edinburgh

metaphysics

intellectual movement

Scottish Common Sense Realism

An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense

Essays on the intellectual powers of man

is an occult quality which we cannot pin down but which never the less affects our senses.

Thomas Reid describes beauty as an occult quality: we know how it affects our senses, but not what it is in itself.

is our access to the world. In opposition to philosophers who think external knowledge impossible, in fact, the foundations upon which our common sense are built justify our belief that there is an external world.

Reid believed that common sense (in a special philosophical sense of sensus communis) is, or at least should be, at the foundation of all philosophical inquiry.[3] He disagreed with Hume, who asserted that we can never know what an external world consist 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.' (wikipedia'

is an outgrowth of epistemology, because once we are confirmed in our common beliefs, we know what is right and need only to act upon them.

He thought epistemology was an introductory part to practical ethics: When we are confirmed in our common beliefs by philosophy, all we have to do is to act according to them, because we know what is right.' (wiki)

Thomas Reid

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Thomas Reid