Knowledge Without Intellectualism

Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid was one of most important philosophers in the eighteenth century. He thought philosophy was led to skepticism by Hume. To destroy skepticism, Reid established his philosophy of common sense. Though common sense philosophy had considerable influence in history of philosophy, from the second half of nineteenth century, Reid’s influence began to vanish gradually and his philosophy was been misunderstood severely. But the end of twentieth witnessed a revival of interest in his philosophy. Thomas Reid inspired many contemporary philosophers, such as Roderick Chisholm and Alvin Plantinga. The system of Reid’s philosophy was huge and concerned many branches of philosophy. In this dissertation we will focus on his theory of knowledge. Generally speaking, Reid’s theory was thought as the fight against idealism and skepticism and many studies emphasize his refutation of theories of idea and his defense of common sense. In fact, theories of idea and skepticism were the symptoms of intellectualism in the early modern philosophy. In brief, the main problems of epistemology in early modern philosophy were the objectivity of thought and normativity of thought. Philosophers were supposed to find solutions to these two questions. How does thought connect to reality? What should the subject do if he wants to think rationally? For the first question, theories of idea were the answer to objectivity of thought. The deontology of justification is the solution of normativity of thought. Both led philosophy into skepticism. it was intellectualism which motivated the two approaches. In Contrasting to Reid’s naturalism, theory of common sense, and observation, intellectualism highly praised reason, theory and theoretical hypothesis.