The Defence of Common Sense in Reid and Moore

Abstract

It is to be expected that two philosophers who set out explicitly to defend common sense against idealism and scepticism would proceed from common assumptions and employ similar strategies of argumentation. This is, in fact, the case with Reid and Moore. Neither Reid nor Moore are prepared to accept philosophical positions, however acutely argued, which deny outright realities that they take to be constitutive of ordinary life — e.g., physical objects, self-identity, other minds — or which deny the reasonableness of our everyday beliefs concerning them. The beliefs of common sense are defined in opposition to these denials; and their philosophies, it is fair to say, are essentially reactionary. If to the list of opponents (which for Reid included the subjective idealism of Berkeley and the phenomenalistic scepticism of Hume) Moore adds the absolute idealism of Bradley, et al, this is merely the result of historical circumstance. The essential spirit of their argumentation is the same. One would expect Reid to have been similarly disposed against the denial of the reality of time or the assertion that only the Absolute is real.