Thomas Reid’s common sense philosophy of mind

Thomas Reid’s philosophy is a philosophy of mind. The aim of his published works is to construct what he calls “a just system of the mind; that is, an enumeration of the original powers and laws of our constitution, and an explication from them of the various phenomena of human nature”. In Reid’s day, the “phenomena of human nature” to be explicated in the philosophy of mind were wide-ranging. His methodological commitments are rooted in a sense of continuity between philosophy and the concerns of common life. The concerns of common life are not only the root of the proper principles of reasoning in philosophy; they also give philosophy its central concerns, and implicitly constrain acceptable theories. Reid’s philosophy of mind is thus presented in the form of a compendium of analyses of specific mental phenomena.