Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Thomas Reid, David Hume's philosophical contemporary and fellow Scot, characterized many early modern philosophers, from Descartes to Hume, as holding “the common theory of ideas.” By this he meant that they regarded the mind as immediately perceiving only certain mental entities, usually called ideas. Although Hume differed from most of his early-modern predecessors in using the term “perception” for these mental entities, reserving the term “idea” for the proper subset of them experienced in thought as opposed to feeling, Reid was clearly right to classify Hume as part of this tradition; for Hume confidently asserts, “‘twill readily be allowd’ that… nothing is ever really present to the mind, besides its own perceptions” (T 1.4.2.21). Yet the label Reid helped to popularize can easily obscure many important differences among the philosophers to whom he applied it, and this is nowhere truer than in the case of Hume.Hume's philosophical ambition, as expressed in the Introduction to A Treatise of Human Nature, was to establish a “science of man” that, by explaining the operations of the human mind, would provide a foundation “almost entirely new” for all of the sciences. The primary objects of that foundational science are the mental entities that he calls perceptions, and especially those perceptions that he classifies as ideas. There is a way, then, in which most of his philosophy ... log in or subscribe to read full text