Thomas Reid

Born in 1710, Reid trained in religion but turned to philosophy, where he became Hume's earliest and fiercest critic. He founded the Scottish School of Common Sense, arguing that perception and basic truths don't need elaborate proof — they're self-evident starting points, not puzzles to dissolve. His work spread across epistemology, free will (he championed agent causation), ethics, language, and philosophy of mind. In 1783 he co-founded the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind arrived in 1788, laying out how the mind acts — through will, moral princip…