Thomas Reid: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Anatomy of the Self

213 Pages·1998·13.73 MB·English

by  Roger D. Gallie (auth.)

THOMAS REID: ETHICS, AESTHETICS AND THE ANATOMY OF THE SELF
PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES
VOLUME 78
Founded by Wilfrid S. Sellars and Keith Lehrer
Editor
Keith Lehrer, University ofA rizona, Tucson
Associate Editor
Stewart Cohen, Arizona State University, Tempe
Board of Consulting Editors
Lynne Rudder Baker, University ofM assachusetts at Amherst
Radu Bogdan, Tulane University, New Orleans
Allan Gibbard, University ofM ichigan
Denise Meyerson, University of Cape Town
Fran~ois Recanati, Ecole Poly technique, Paris
Stuart Silvers, Clemson University
Nicholas D. Smith, Michigan State University
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
THOMAS REID:
ETHICS, AESTHETICS
AND THE ANATOMY
OF THE SELF
ROGER D. GALLIE
University ofN ottingham. United Kingdom
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
A c.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5095-3 ISBN 978-94-015-9020-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-9020-4
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
©
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1998
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1998
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ix
CHAPTER 1: PERCEPTION, SENSATION AND FIRST PRINCIPLES -
THE INGREDIENTS OF A SENSE
I: The place of sensation in perception
II: Notions of primary qualities versus notions of secondary
qualities 4
III: Is there room for sensation in the case of vision? 5
IV: Causal accounts of perception 7
V: The doctrine of a sense and first principles 8
VI: Sensations and moral feelings 11
CHAPTER 2: THE VARIETIES OF CAUSATION 13
I: Active power, speculative power and physical causation 13
II: The circumstances in which genuine power can be exercised 15
III: Physical causes versus proper causes 18
IV:Establishing physical and agent causes 21
V: Establishing final causes 22
VI: Establishing that someone has seen something 24
CHAPTER 3: ACTION, MOTIVATION AND MORAL
PSYCHOLOGY 27
I: Is agency possible? 27
II: Further difficulties for the possibility of agency 29
III: An alternative to agency? 31
IV: The strength of motives: animal motives, instincts and
habits 33
V: The affections: their strength and prevalence 35
VI: Rational principles of action: their strength and weakness 39
VII: The variety of explanatory principles and folk psychology 41
CHAPTER 4: LANGUAGE, CONCEPTION AND
REPRESENTATION 45
I: The moderate thesis about conception 45
II: The conception of individuals 47
III: The conception of entia rationis 48
IV: Having conceptions of attributes 50
V: The moderate thesis and Fodor's RTM 52
VI: Interpretations of signs and innate possession of
conceptions 54
VII: Innate sources of conceptions and innate conceptions 57
VIII: More on innate sources of conceptions 58
v
VI ETHICS, AESTHETICS AND THE ANATOMY OF THE SELF
IX: The explanatory power of computational models of mental
acts 59
CHAPTER 5: THE NATURE OF PERSONS 63
I: Some problems on the nature of persons 63
II: Indivisibility of the person and the whole man or woman 64
III: Is a totally disembodied existence
for persons impossible? 66
IV: On Reid's declaration that the mind is an unextended and
indivisible substance 67
V: Can persons having unextended and indivisible minds and no
bodies think or act? 70
VI: Active mind, passive matter 73
VII: The unextended and indivisible mind and the survival of
death 77
VIII: Survival based on a just administration of the world 79
IX: The soul or mind as a vital principle 81
CHAPTER 6: MORAL JUDGMENT 85
I: Comparing perceptual and moral judgment 85
II: Linguistic arguments for the objectivity of moral assessments 90
III: Reid and the argument from queerness 93
IV: Reid and the argument from relativity 96
V: Obtaining derivative moral principles 99
VI: The availability of particular first principles of morals 103
VII: On the fallibility of the moral faculty 106
VIII: The moral assessment of particular cases 108
CHAPTER 7: PRESENTING MORALITY 113
I: On the need for instruction in morals and for systematic
presentations of morals 114
II: Presentations of morals involving one's duties to God 115
Ill: A presentation of morals based on one's position and its
duties 116
IV: Perfect versus imperfect obligation 118
V: Presentations of morals by way of rights 119
VI: On presentations of morals by way of one's good upon the
whole 121
VII: Presentations of morals by way of the virtues 124
VIII: Hume's two arguments for a distinction between natural and
artificial virtues 128
IX: Reid's rejection of Hume's first argument for the
distinction 129
X: Benevolent acts and benevolent intentions 132
XI: Regard to justice and regard to gratitude 134
CONTENTS vii
XII: Is to act virtuously to act with virtuous intent without an
ulterior motive? 135
XIII: The good effects of justice versus those of benevolence 136
XIV: The requirements of justice and natural rights 139
CHAPTER 8: THE JUDGMENT OF BEAUTY 145
I: The sense of beauty and the external sense of taste 145
II: Judments of beauty and judgments of excellence 148
III: Instinctive and rational judgments of beauty and the first
principles of taste 151
IV: Reid, Gerard and Kant's antinomy of taste 154
V: Objectivity and realism in aesthetics 157
VI: Does 'beautiful' have distinct meaning? 158
CHAPTER 9: THE SUBLIME, THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE NOVEL 161
I: The basic structure of Reid's account of the sublime 161
II: Burke's account of the sublime 163
III: Sublimity and analogy of attribution 165
IV: Reid's account of the nature of beauty 171
V: Expression, and the expression theory of art 174
VI: Reid on natural beauty 180
VII: Reid on novelty 182
BIBLIOGRAPHY 185
INDEX 191
INTRODUCTION
I: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF REID
Thomas Reid (1710-96) was born at Strachan in Kincardineshire, Scotland, not far
from Aberdeen. Reid was fortunate in his family connections. For instance his
mother's brother was David Gregory, Savilian professor of Astronomy at Oxford
and close friend of Sir Isaac Newton. Reid entered Marischal College, Aberdeen,
at the age of twelve after the usual spell in Aberdeen Grammar School. After a
short period as college librarian he married his cousin Margaret Gregory, having
gained the position of (Presbyterian) minister at New Machar, in the gift of King's
College, Aberdeen, which he held from 1737 till 1752. Although Reid published
only one paper, An Essay on Quantity, in this period he was far from intellectually
idle; for one thing he familiarised himself with the works of Bishop Butler,
especially The Analogy of Religion, which, together with those of Samuel Clarke
and Isaac Newton, were to have a profound influence on his mature philosophy.
In 1752 Reid was appointed a regent at King's College, Aberdeen. During
his regency he not only founded a crucially important discussion group, 'The Wise
Club', and familiarised himself with David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature
both through his own reading and by exhaustive discussion of it within the group;
he also wrote extensively. He composed and delivered his seminal Latin
Philosophical Orations. More importantly, he presented as instalments to the Wise
Club what was to be published in 1764 as An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the
Principles of Common Sense, a work which Hume, in a letter to Hugh Blair,
admitted to be challenging, and which helped secure his appointment to the chair
of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University later in that same year as successor to
Adam Smith.
Throughout this period Reid's thought underwent extensive development
as is evident from the latest of his philosophical orations. This development came
to fruition in Glasgow, culminating in the publication of his two mature works after
his retirement in 1780, namely Essays on the Intellectual Powers ofM an (1785) and
Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788). In addition, there was a fascinating
correspondence, most notably with Lord Kames and his own cousin, James Gregory,
and a lively controversy with Joseph Priestley on materialism. Among other things
the correspondence shows Reid's thorough acquaintance with the writings of
Newton, his thorough grasp of the natural science of his time and an awareness of
the limits of the realm of scientific enquiry.
II: OUTLINE OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK
This work is intended to serve mainly as a study of Reid's moral philosophy and
his aesthetics partly by way of an exposition and appraisal of Reid's anatomy of the
self. This is his division of the mind in respect of its powers and the assignment of
the many principles of action to their appropriate levels. A pervasive topic of the
IX
x ETHICS, AESTHETICS AND THE ANATOMY OF THE SELF
book will be consideration of the appropriateness of deterministic computational
cognitive science models of Reid's accounts of powers and faculties introduced by
John Smith III and extensively employed by Keith Lehrer in his important study of
Reid's philosophy, Thomas Reid.
As students of Reid will be well aware, Reid is a proponent of a moral
sense theory of moral assessment, a theory that claims that there is an important
analogy between our powers of making moral assessments and our powers of
ordinary sensory perception, in particular the power of sight. Reid also accepts that
there is a power of the mind analogous to the external·sense of taste 'by which we
are capable of discerning and relishing the beauties of nature, and whatever is
excellent in the fine arts'. It is therefore necessary to devote some space to
explaining Reid's anti-sceptical views on the topic of ordinary perception to aid
understanding of how he arrives at his view that moral and aesthetic assessment
have important features in common with sensory perception. This is done in chapter
I. In addition attention is focused on Reid's insistence that perception is an act of
the mind and not a passive reaction to one's surroundings. This is the first area in
which consideration of the Lehrer-Smith model is undertaken, principally under the
aspect of whatever determinism is involved in such models.
In chapter 2 Reid's views on causation are fully presented. In his view
there are several kinds of cause. The causes that Reid thinks most important are
agents with active power. Reid insists that whatever is an effect of such a cause is
contingent. That is to say, the effect might not have occurred in the same
circumstances. Reid allows that agents have speculative power whose exercise,
unlike that of active power as far as we can conceive its exercise, does not involve
the will, although it seems that Reid thinks that its effects are contingent as well.
Reid admits that it is established usage to say that heat causes ice to melt. Such
effects invariably follow what Reid calls their physical causes, and one question that
arises is whether, in any reasonable sense of 'the same circumstances', something
physically caused might not have occurred in those circumstances. If so it might
then be less objectionable to model Reid's account of agency by way of
deterministic computational models in the manner of Lehrer and Smith.
In chapter 3 certain obstacles in the way of acceptance of full blooded
contingent agent causation are considered, notably difficulties in the wake of Reid's
requirement that determinations of the will of an agent with moral liberty leading
to her free actions must themselves be freely chosen. The alternative deterministic
picture of agency involving the doctrine of the prevalence of the strongest motive
is challenged by way of a thorough survey of the wide variety of motives in human
nature, ranging from hunger, via emulation and gratitude, to our good upon the
whole and our sense of duty. The survey suggests that the notion of strength of
motive is clearly applicable only in a few cases, and in even fewer than Reid thinks.
Chapter 4 sets forth Reid's view of linguistic representation and considers
the relation between the capacity to conceive something, including centaurs, familiar
concrete objects and universals, and the capacity to represent it, or its components,
linguistically. While it may be conceded that Reid holds that conception of all kinds
involves some capacity to represent linguistically there is no sign that Reid accepts
the position of Fodor that conceiving or perceiving something requires a relation