商品簡介
The Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788) was Thomas Reid's last major work. It was conceived as part of one large work, intended as a final synoptic statement of his philosophy. The first and larger part was published three years earlier as Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (edited as vol. 3 of the Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid). These two works are united by Reid's basic philosophy of Common Sense, which sets out native principles by which the mind operates in both its intellectual and active aspects. The Active Powers shows how these principles are involved in volition, action, and the ability to judge morally. Reid gives an original twist to a libertarian and realist tradition that was prominently represented in eighteenth-century British thought by such thinkers as Samuel Clarke and Richard Price.
Traditionally seen as an epistemologist, Reid has in much recent work emerged as a significant contributor to the philosophy of action and to ethics. This edition of the Active Powers will be of interest not only to historians of philosophy but also to philosophers working on the theory of action, on the problem of free will, and in moral psychology and meta-ethics
作者簡介
Thomas Reid (1710-96) is an original philosopher of lasting importance and a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. In recognition of this, the Edinburgh Edition makes available both the first critical editions of the philosophical treatises that established Reid as the great critic of David Hume and extensive manuscript materials which have never been published before and which show Reid as a strikingly versatile Enlightenment thinker. Introductions and notes by an international group of specialists make the volumes equally valuable to the student and to the scholar.
James Tassie, Professor Thomas Reid, 1710-96. Philosopher. Courtesy of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Knud Haakonssen is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex. He is editor of the Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy and the Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith. He is General Editor of the Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid.
James A. Harris is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Problem in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy.
