respect to the meaning of words, not with respect to the truth or falsehoodof propositions, that the man in the street had the Wnal say.. And when he talks of ‘common sense’ he does not
Trang 1respect to the meaning of words, not with respect to the truth or falsehood
of propositions, that the man in the street had the Wnal say And when he talks of ‘common sense’ he does not mean popular beliefs about nature, or old wives’ gossip, but rather the self-evident principles which other philo-sophers presented as intuitions of reason Science itself was not a matter of simple common sense, but rather of rational inquiry conducted in the light
of common sense; and the outcome of scientiWc investigation may well trump individual prejudices of the vulgar
Reid himself was an experimental scientist, who produced original results
in the geometry of visible objects, some of them anticipating the develop-ment of non-Euclidean geometries What he wanted to show in his phil-osophy was that the realism of the common man was at least as compatible with the pursuit of science as the sophisticated and sophistical philosophy of the rationalists and the empiricists
The Enlightenment Adam Smith and Thomas Reid were two distinguished ornaments of what later came to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment Throughout the Europe of the eighteenth century members of the intelligentsia saw themselves as bringing the light of reason into regions darkened by ignorance and superstition, but it was France which was seen by itself and others as the home of the Enlightenment par excellence The high point
of the French enlightenment was the publication in the 1750s and 1760s of the seventeen volumes of the Encyclope´die, ou Dictionannaire raisonne´ des arts et des me´tiers, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert But the ground for this manifesto had been prepared for more than half a century by other French thinkers
Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) had brought out a Dictionnaire Historique et Critique
in which he showed, by detailed studies of biblical and historical person-ages, the inconsistency and incoherence of much of natural and revealed theology The moral of his tour d’horizon was that religious faith was only tenable if accompanied by general toleration, and that the teaching of ethics should be made independent of religious instruction Belief in human immortality, or in the existence of God, was not something necessary for virtuous living
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