Problems from Reid bears an apt title for James Van Cleve's comprehensive examination of philosophical questions that arise in the work of Thomas Reid and that continue to engage us today. Drawing from fifteen years of publications on Reid, Van Cleve presents a unified understanding of Reid by our own lights, that is, by the lights of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone analytic philosophy. Problems is not a contribution to what may be called contextualist history of philosophy: an interpretation that places the text alongside cultural, social, political, economic, and other historical evidence in order to arrive at a picture of a thinker and his ideas in his time. Rather, Van Cleve situates Reid in the argumentative space of current philosophical thinking. This approach allows Van Cleve to regiment Reid's texts by rendering his prose into arguments in premise form, and to use current conceptual...
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1 January 2018
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