ABSTRACT
Thomas Reid (1710–1796) is regarded as the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, a philosophical movement that gave impetus to the study of rhetoric in Scotland in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Reid invoked common sense in reaction to the skepticism, both epistemological and religious, which was being promoted by a close contemporary Scot, David Hume (1711–1776). Reid also reacted to a type of empiricism on which Hume’s teaching was based and that had earlier been proposed by Locke (1632–1704) and Berkeley (1685–1753). Though neither a rhetorician nor a professed Aristotelian, Reid actually preserved the realist foundations on which classical rhetoric had been based, and so exerted an important influence on the Scottish rhetorics that arose around his time. This chapter sketches how Reid did so by concentrating on the powers of the human mind, which he thought were accessible to common sense, and so could serve as a basis for rhetorical theory and practice in his day as in the present. The powers in which Reid was interested are of two types: intellectual powers and active powers. These suffice for his practical ethics and for the uses to which human powers might be put when developing persuasive techniques.
