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thomasreid

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Everything posted by thomasreid

  1. The way Robertson explains the new Hume stuff makes it sounds like the debate is about whether cause exists or cause is unknowable. This for me just drags out the skepticism and absurdity if you like Reid. The position seems to be that either Hume in fact believed cause was a fantasy and should be attributed to the habit of the mind OR he thought it was in the noumenal, to steal Kant's crap.
  2. Also, I think Reid's explicit target was Locke. But many believe he made it about Locke as a summation for his response to Hume. And he had a weird reverence for Hume.
  3. So much for my assertion that nobody reads Reid anymore. A class? I wish I could take a class. Dan Robertson said there was a resurgence, but I had no idea.
  4. "Given that there is one single reality, how do we understand it relative to the other one?" Nietzsche
  5. I think the reason nobody saw the connection is that nobody has heard of Reid. As you say, you have only seen a Wiki article, which is about all you find if you don't go looking. Everyone is obsessed with Hume and Kant and they forgot the other piece of the puzzle because he's too simple. As Dan Robinson puts it, "Reid doesn't take the time to be confusing enough." For more on confusion, see Heidegger. I think a good way to start the fleshing out is with my comment on a priori. Think about what Kant was doing. He was mad at Hume for dangerously removing the idea from Metaphysics and drowning the discipline (killing metaphysics). Kant's effort was to revive it to continue Philosophy proper and to stay with fundamentals. But you need fundamentals to continue them. So, Kant argues that you can posit a priori in a synthetic way and this brings about "transcendentalism," for Kant. I'm not saying I agree with this. What Reid and Rand do about this very topic is they make an implicit argument through their style (arguments) that amount to: Some things are just given (really given). As Robinson says in one of his famous Youtube Hume vs Reid sections, How does Reid explain that we have access to the material world? Because we do. In a vacuum this would be a whole stew of fallacies. But with the other work surrounding Reid (and maybe even Rand), there becomes a constellation of careful and thoughtful discussions that bring about the common sense, "obvious" character of their a priori substructures. Kant tried to do this. He just tried to be too rigorous.
  6. Let's be honest. Nobody's heard of Reid. We've all heard of Kant, and even though Rand confuses him with Hume most of the time, and blames Kant's subjectivism on Kant (should be on Hume), we all pass over Reid and don't realize that he (and his sidekick James Beattie) were the Rands of the 18th century. It is amazing how much Reid's common sense (rational and OBVIOUS a priori-ization) and his contempt for empiricism look like Rand's arguments 200 years later. It really is eerie. What you really have is Reid setting the stage for what ... ? Oh, everything, the USA (immanent rights), James, Peirce, Existentialism ... and then Heidegger stepping in and taking Descartes even further inside (? man he's weird, fun to read, should have stayed in side with the French chick) and then Rand. Throw out all your other books (except for the Genealogy) and your esoteric office shelves will be much easier to clean. So, my lordship, my lord, I humble myself before the great one, Thomas Reid ... the guy who said "*&*)* your mother" to Hume.
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