Donald David Todd

This book is the second volume of a critical edition of the writings of Thomas Reid, an edition that will include many of his manuscript remains as well as his previously published works. These volumes are intended to displace the heretofore standard 8th edition of Reid’s works edited by Sir William Hamilton. Hamilton’s edition is marred by his numerous, often intrusive, and obtuse footnotes. Reid’s spelling and punctuation were also sometimes “corrected” by Hamilton, so his edition does not present a fully accurate version of the original editions whose publication was superintended by Reid. The type in the Hamilton edition is also archaic and very small, making reading the text excessively difficult. The present and subsequent volumes are intended to present canonical texts free of the flaws in the Hamilton text. This volume succeeds admirably in that project.

These two books are Volumes 1 and 2 of a three-volume work; the projected third volume, Warranted Christian Belief, has yet to be published. In the first volume, Warrant: The Current Debate, Plantinga surveys the current chaos in epistemology stemming from the breakdown of classical foundationalism and examines critically the efforts of several contemporary philosophers to introduce some order into the field, most particularly Roderick Chisholm, William Alston, John Pollock, Laurence BonJour and, to a lesser extent, others such as Richard Foley, Fred Dretske and Alvin Goldman. In this volume, Plantinga is trying not only to put out of play the views he rejects but also to provide the reader with anticipations of his own views in Warrant and Proper Function. Although there is an immense amount of overlap between these books, and there is much cross-referencing, they are not continuous; each can be read entirely independently of the other. Even should, through some misfortune, the projected third volume fail to be written, these two volumes are certain to stand for a long time as exceptionally important works. Warrant and Proper Function, in particular, is likely to generate a veritable Niagara of Ph.D. theses in a field many had come to see as having reached the point of diminishing nits.

Thomas Reid delivered philosophical orations triennially, in Latin, at graduation ceremonies in King's College, Aberdeen, 1753-1762. Each of the four orations is a summary of Reid's views on several philosophical topics, e.g. the "laws of practising philosophy"; the philosophy of science; the "theory of ideas". This translation from the Latin text is prefaced with an historical and philosophical introduction to the thought of Reid and his school. The text is footnoted with cross-references to Reid's published writings to enable the reader to compare these early expressions of Reid's philosophy with his mature thought. A thorough bibliography of the most available editions of Reid's works and of the most important modern books and articles on Reid is appended.

This book will be received ill-naturedly by those who think that a book with such a title ought, mainly anyway, to consist of critical exegesis of the work of its philosophical heroes and/or villains on the “central themes” which Professor Bennett selects for his attention. Such readers are likely to feel that when Bennett attributes this or that view, error, or insight to one of the protagonists, he ought usually t o put the man's name in quotation marks. But such a reaction to this book would be at least churlish, for Bennett explicitly eschews both historical concerns and scholarship except in the limited sense that he sometimes pays close attention to textual details.