Books in the The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid series

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.

Thomas Reid might not have published much on politics, but his manuscripts reveal that he was deeply concerned with social, political and economic issues throughout his career. Published here for the first time, Reid's Glasgow lecture notes and his papers to learned societies in Aberdeen and Glasgow show that he was an acute commentator on contemporary politics and that his theoretical ideas framed solutions to some of the practical political and economic problems of his day.

This new edition of Reid's classic philosophical text in the philosophy of mind at long last gives scholars a complete, rigorously edited text of the Inquiry with full critical apparatus in paperback.

Brings together, for the first time, a significant number of Reid's manuscript papers on natural history, physiology and materialist metaphysics.

The fullest, most original presentation of the philosophy of Common Sense, accompanied by manuscript lectures on the nature and immortality of the soul, a helpful introduction and editorial annotation.