Reid’s Influence in Britain, Germany, France, and America

Abstract

The philosophy of Thomas Reid has exercised an enormous influence on Western thought from the publication of his Inquiry in 1764 until the present day. Reid's thought appeared on the world stage as at once amenable to science, Christian beliefs, the rise of a modern public sphere, and democratic politics. Exercising its most profound impact in postrevolutionary France and America, it promised to combine progress and stability by establishing links between common sense experience and philosophical and scientific thought in an era of rapid sociopolitical, religious, and scientific change. Reidian thought, moreover, had a significant impact on the development of higher education in both countries and was an important undercurrent in the broad expanse of nineteenth-century intellectual culture, an undercurrent that fed and mingled with other streams of Enlightenment thought. And although an identifiable school of “common sense philosophy” began to wane around the middle of the nineteenth century, Reid’s thought proved to be a multivalent and fertile influence on subsequent philosophical developments in Britain, France, and America such as positivism and pragmatism. Reid’s impact in German-speaking lands was slight but worth considering, since it has been claimed that his thought was highly influential there, and Kantianism became an important alternative – and at times bedfellow – to it.