ABSTRACT
What about de Bary’s argument that, just considered all on its own, the passage in which Reid makes it sound like FP#7 is special is problematic? As we saw just above, de Bary claims that if FP#7 is supposed to be a metaprinciple, it’s an incongruous choice for Reid to make. Again he writes:
Dr. Reid should surely not, by his own lights, be claiming that the truth of the set of human faculties is ‘prior to all others in the order of nature.’ We should expect whatever truth occupies that cosmic ‘pole position’ to include a reference to God, nature’s Wise and Bountiful Author. And in any case, we can find a candidate with at least as good a claim to priority from among Reid’s purely secular list of twelve first principles, namely principle 12: ‘That in the phaenomena of nature. What is to be, will probably be like to what has been in similar circumstances.’ (2000, 382).
