Lorne Falkenstein

This paper examines the principal objections that Hume’s Scots contemporaries, George Campbell, James Beattie, and Thomas Reid raised against his views of testimony, belief, and the “theory of ideas.” In opposition to Kant’s claim that “Reid, Oswald, and Beattie” had “appealed to common sense as an oracle when insight and research [failed them]” and had “[taken] for granted what [Hume] meant to call into doubt while emphatically, and often with great indignation, demonstrating what he had never thought to question” it is shown that, in each case, Hume’s critics understood him correctly and raised serious objections. But it is also shown that Hume’s work contains all the materials necessary to mount an effective response to their objections.

This chapter on classical empiricism is divided into three sections, namely, absolutism, idealism, and memory. Presentism poses a particular problem for the empiricist view that the idea of time arises from people's experience of the succession of their ideas. The view that time passes independently of the succession of ideas was shared by canonically empiricist philosophers, such as Gassendi, Locke, and Newton. The idea of time arises from a compound impression that consists of successively disposed simple impressions – impressions that may be identical in all respects but for their manner of disposition, and that may be disposed on either side of an unoccupied gap. People's experience is not confined to the present moment. The truly radical implication is that the past is not destroyed. It persists, not into the present by way of a trace or echo, but in the past, which continues to be visible to consciousness.

Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense devotes more space to double vision than to any other topic. In what follows, I examine why this subject was so important to Reid and why he dealt with it as he did. I also consider whether his argument for his position begs the question against his main opponents, Berkeley and Robert Smith. I show that, as Reid presented it, it does, but that he could have said more than he did in reply to Smith. My discussion of why double vision was important for Reid begins with an exposition of the relevance of the theory of vision for one of Reid's principal concerns in the Inquiry: the concern to respond to scepticism concerning our knowledge of an external world. I then turn to consider how Reid's account of double vision contributes to his epistemological realism and why the alternative account offered by Berkeley and Smith challenges it.

: I argue that Condillac was committed to four mutually inconsistent propositions: that the mind is unextended, that sensations are modifications of the mind, that colours are sensations, and that colours are extended. I argue that this inconsistency was not just the blunder of a second-rate philosopher, but the consequence of a deep-seated tension in the views of early modern philosophers on the nature of the mind, sensation, and secondary qualities and that more widely studied figures, notably Condillac's contemporaries, Hume and Reid, were not ultimately any more successful at developing an account of vision that unproblematically avoids the paradox. In passing, I take issue with Nicholas Pastore's account of how Condillac's Treatise on Sensations deals with the visual perception of form (in A Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception)