Reid had a theory of the human mind containing a theory of truth, both of our evidence of truth and the conditions of truth, fully consistent with empiricism. The justification and evidence of first principles is something felt in consciousness rather than some external relation. This is the result of our faculties, original and natural powers of our constitution. Original convictions and conceptions arise from our faculties in response to experience as a result of our natural development. Reid combines elements of foundationalism, coherentism, falliblism and nominalism. I distinguish and compare Reid to Hume, Moore, Quine, James and Wittgenstein.

By Reid's own account, ‘That the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious’ (FP#7), has a special place among the First Principles of Contingent Truths. Some have found that claim puzzling, but it is not. Contrary to what's usually assumed, certain FPs preceding FP#7 do not already assert the better part of what FP#7 explicitly states. FP#7 is needed because there is nothing epistemological in the FPs that precede it; and its special place among the FPs is a straightforward consequence of its being both perfectly general and distinctively epistemological.

My theme in this essay is the anti-rationalism in Reid's thought. I explore three areas of Reid's thought in which anti-rationalism is a prominent feature: Reid's attack on the Way of Ideas and his own account of how beliefs are formed, in particular, perceptual beliefs, his response to the skeptic, and his understanding of the task of the philosopher.

According to Thomas Reid, powers of will and powers of understanding are distinguishable in thought, but conjoined in practice. This paper examines the claim that there is no inert intelligence, the operations of the understanding involving some degree of activity. The question is: whose activity? For it is clear that a great deal of our mental activity is not in our power. We need to distinguish between a weak and a strong sense of ‘power’, and consider our dependence ‘upon God and the laws of nature’ in our mental exertions.

Thomas Reid distinguished between natural and artificial language and argued that natural language has a very specific sort of priority over artificial language. This paper critically interprets Reid's discussion, extracts a Reidian explanatory argument for the priority of natural language, and places Reid's thought in the broad tradition of Cartesian linguistics.

This paper argues that Reid's first principle of design can be more widely accepted then one might suppose, due to the fact that it specifies no marks of design. Also it is explicated that the relation of the principle, on the one hand, and properly basic design beliefs on the other, is a relation of presupposition. It is furthermore suggested that Reid's discussion of what can be done in case of disagreement about first principles points to a position that is relevant to the current debates in the Epistemology of Disagreement literature and that merits further elaboration.