What's Going on w Reid?

It is an interesting question, what does Reid mean for the definition of philosophy? In his time science was new and the line between it and philosophy was different. A major take-away from his work is that philosophy done in one's own head, not tied to the real world, is inevitably pointless and obscurant. In some sense, Reid was more of an empiricist than the empiricists.

What we see in Reid is the ultimate iconoclasm. He does not accept trends. The trend to leave the physical world to the new science to make room for the great ideas of philosophy is one. Reid goes against this. The philosopher, he says, must leave his armchair and venture out and explore. This exploration is now something that we would call science.

In Reid's time the scientists were to some extent philosophers. The titles of books, like Newton's, contained the phrase "natural philosophy."

We say now that once something becomes understood in scientific terms, it ceases to be philosophy and becomes a particular science. This is of course what happened to, for instance, psychology. The evolution of science as it was in the 17th Century and what it is now inevitably has changed and altered this definition. For example, there are less things now that we are ultimately perplexed by. It may even be said that what's left to philosophy is morality, aesthetics and religion.

What is valuable about Reid now is the iconoclastic style as we might apply it today. Following this style, how sure are we that we know things "scientifically?" The concepts about mind are good examples of this problem. Neuroscience can tell us how the brain works, and what parts of the brain do what, and even, according to Dan L. Robinson, how we see individual colors. Most scientists agree that this constitutes a legitimate science. If they did not, they would be out of business. Reid's charge, however, and the style, brings us to a question related to this: What is an idea? I don't mean: What are you thinking? I mean: When you are thinking, what is that thing made of that appears as a thought?

I get that this is part of what phenomenology studied philosophically. What I don't get is why the discussion has to be obscurant and impenetrable. It seems fairly easy to form the question, as I did, and then precede. Yes, in the past two hundred years, this is not what happened. The writers that focused on the phenomenology of thought, for a lack of better phrases, have made the question and then the answer less understandable than any potential commonsense discussion on the issue.

And this is where Reid differed. He is not alive today, but discussion where he would be on ideas like this are rare and out of context for us. We are part and parcel of the Hyper-critical style of philosophy post-Kant. To bring back Reid is to open up the discussion with this old/new style. How can we discuss and understand mind, as it is different from the science, in a way that seems more valuable intellectually and less esoteric and exclusive?