In Our Time - Common Sense Philosophy

Episode Date: June 21, 2007

Melvyn Bragg looks at an unexpected philosophical subject - the philosophy of common sense. In the first century BC the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero claimed “There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it”. Indeed, in the history of Western thought, philosophers have rarely been credited with having much common sense. In the 17th century Francis Bacon made a similar point when he wrote “Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high”. Samuel Johnson picked up the theme with characteristic pugnacity in 1751 declaring that “the public would suffer less present inconvenience from the banishment of philosophers than from the extinction of any common trade.” Philosophers, it seems, are as distinct from the common man as philosophy is from common sense.But as Samuel Johnson scribbled his pithy knockdown in the Rambler magazine, the greatest philosophers in Britain were locked in a dispute about the very thing he denied them: Common Sense. It was a dispute about the nature of knowledge and the individuality of man, from which we derive the idea of common sense today. The chief antagonists were a minister of the Scottish Church, Thomas Reid, and the bon-viveur darling of the Edinburg chattering classes, David Hume. It's a journey that also takes in Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, John Locke and some of the most profound questions about human knowledge we are capable of asking.With A C Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London; Melissa Lane, Senior University Lecturer in History at Cambridge University; Alexander Broadie, Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at the University of Glasgow.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In the first century BC, the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero claimed, there's no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.

Indeed, in the history of Western thought, philosophers have rarely been credited with having much common sense. In the 17th century, Francis Bacon made the point rather poised, and wrote, Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they're so high. Samuel Johnson picked up the theme,

with some pugnacity in 1751, declaring that the public would suffer less present inconvenience from the banishment of philosophers than from the extinction of any common trade. But as Samuel Johnson scribbled his knockdown in the Rambler magazine, the greatest philosophers in Britain were locked in dispute about the very thing he denied them, common sense. It was a dispute about the nature of knowledge and the individuality of man, from which we derive the idea of common sense today.

But what is common sense philosophy? Who are its proponents and how did it emerge from the tides of skepticism, empiricism, and rational inquiry running through 18th century Europe? With me to discuss common sense philosophy are A.C. Grayling, professor of philosophy at Birkbeck University of London. Melissa Lane, senior university lecturer in history at Cambridge University, and Alexander Brody, Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at the University of Glasgow. Anthony Grayling, the idea of common sense philosophy might sound contradictory to a lot of people, so could you tell us how you see it?

Well, first we've got to distinguish, which is always the starting point in philosophy, between two quite different senses of common sense. On the much older one, which goes all the way back to Aristotle, is the idea that because our different senses of seeing and hearing and smelling and touching and so on, give us information about a world, about objects in a world, which is unified.

there must be something in the mind which makes common the data that comes in so that we get that unified experience. And that was called the census communists, the common sense in the mind, which makes, as it were, common cause between all the different sense organs. And that's quite a different sense of common sense than the one that we're used to today. What we mean today is very, very fundamental, general, much agreed views, beliefs, concepts about the world, which it would be absolute lunacy to deny or to reject. Common sense being, as it were, the touchstone of the ordinary person in the street. Can you give us some concrete examples so we know how concrete we're being? Well, that there are physical objects that we've spent most of our eyes near the surface of the earth,

that if you put your hand in a flame, it'll burn. And so on these are examples of common sense beliefs that we have, which are so powerfully accredited by our ordinary experience, that, as I say, it would be kind of madness to deny them. You quoted from Fenlau in your notes. Can you explain why you think he encapsulated it so well? Well, he's very often been quoted because he put so nicely this idea of exactly what common-sense beliefs are. Isn't the 18th century, 18th century French prelatan right?

That's exactly right, isn't it ecclesiastic? And in the course of one of his dispositions, as it were, as a kind of side blow to it, he said common-sense beliefs or common-sense notions are those which you cannot contradict all. deny, or even indeed examine. I mean, they are just so basic to us that you can't call them into question, try and examine them. And yet, they are premised in all our thinking and doing otherwise. And he said, if somebody, and this might be a lunatic or a philosopher, that, you know, a collection of two types of people, we have to try to call them into question, then he said,

all I can do is smile. You can't argue about them. So there was some sort of construct there that he saw. How do you think that common sense, you began, I don't know, with Aristotle, how do you think, Where do you think common sense ideas come from? I mean, basically, as I understand it, the argument is between those who think we are born with them, that they're innate, and those who think we learn them, the empiricists. Can you just discourse a little more on those two?

Yes, the way I see it is this, that in the 17th century when the philosophical quest really revived and recapitulated some of the great debates of philosophy in antiquity, especially on the question of knowledge, the nature of knowledge, and the grounds of certainty in knowledge. People were looking for an answer to the question, how is it that we can have beliefs about an external world which seem to work,

or beliefs about moral realities which seem deeply important to us, or beliefs about the existence of a deity, which is so central to 17th century thinking about the world? And there were various attempts by well-known philosophers, so as it might be the empiricists, Locke and Barclay and later on Hume to talk a bit about how we acquire knowledge of the world

through sensory experience alone as if our minds were as Locke began by saying blank slates on which experience rights and then there were others to say look we've got to know certain things as it were the moment of birth because otherwise we wouldn't be able to do any kind of thinking

or experiencing at all so the principles of logic for example or very very fundamental very simple very general beliefs about the world have got to be locked in there at the beginning. Because if they weren't, we just wouldn't be able to get on. You mentioned Aristotle, but there's also Plato, there's the Aristotle Plato, as it were, opposition. And Plato believed that innate ideas were there before we were born, as it were. They were trailing clouds of glory.

It's words as it were transformed. Anyway, never mind that. But Plato thought they were innate meant pre-birth almost. Indeed, he thought our immortal souls, when in their disembodied existence, were in immediate contact with all the great truths. and that when we are conceived or born at some point at any rate of becoming embodied, we forget everything. The process of education is a process of being reminded, at least partially, of some of what we knew in our pre-birth existence. And this is a very, very strong innate ideas thesis, which says that we know everything,

not merely that we have certain capacities for knowing or experiencing, but that we actually have propositional knowledge, and that this is what we forget when we become. I'm embodied. Melissa, and can we turn to the 17th century where this argument

was played out between innatism and empiricism. Let's take a group called the Cambridge Platonists and John Locke. Can you tell us about Cambridge Platonist

and then about John Locke and what was going on between the two of them? Well, the two great images in this debate. One, Anthony, mentioned the blank slate idea from Locke,

and the Cambridge Platonist countered that with the notion of reason as the candle of the Lord. So the image that God has put a candle of understanding into our minds, and we can use that in order to know the world with certainty. Despite the name, the Cambridge Platonists actually drew as much on the Stoics as they did on Plato.

So they did follow Plato's idea that the mind already has certain knowledge, but they took that more in a Stoic sense in which it was not so much that we were always born with the knowledge, but that our minds have a disposition to form certain judgments and concepts. So that might be stimulated by experience, but it is an inborn disposition. and there are sort of common notions, as the Stoics said, in anticipations that we have in our minds. So for the Cambridge Platonists, though, the key idea, if we take, for example, Ralph Cudworth, who also knew Locke and his daughter became a great friend of Locke, so there was real interaction between these groups, really took this idea that the mind can only know what is native and domestic to it, and that enables us to know God, to know morality. Did they bring any evidence about this? Did they mean any proof? So did they reason their way to the birth of reason? They were reasoning their way. I think the main argument was to show that actually the other side, the empiricist, materialist, sensationalist side, that their arguments were faulty. So their arguments were to say, for example, how could you possibly ever form just through the notion, just through sensations alone? How could you possibly form concepts like geometry, for example? You never encounter a perfect triangle in nature. So how would you be able to form the notion of a perfect triangle? That must be an innate idea. So it's a reasoning,

method of attack on the alternative. And the moral idea is too that you had an innate idea of justice, because how could you form an idea of, that was the argument. You can, will you express it much better than I could? Yeah, absolutely. Well, as you say, that the moral ideas are also among these innate ideas, so that we're not just machines for processing data coming in from the senses, but actually we have reason in our minds given by God, and that includes moral notions.

Is God always central to the idea of inatism? Not necessarily. It's not there in exactly that form in Plato. It is arguably there in the Stoics. There's a sort of ambiguity between nature and God. I think it is crucial, though, as you suggest, that very often, perhaps not always, but very often for innatists, the way that we can have a guarantee that our innate ideas are true is because they come from God. And that, I think, does become an issue later on. You know, if one tries to dispense with that premise, it's harder to make that argument. And then the other side, if we can care the other side, but the counter argument is John Locke outlining his ideas in the essay concerning human understanding. Can you tell us how he contradicted, how he opposed the Platonists in that? So in this essay in 1690, Locke does launch a blistering attack on certain innate ideas theorists,

including these Cambridge Platonists. And he really challenged this question of, if you say that there are these universal ideas that are innate, well, which ideas are they, actually? we don't agree on everything. People don't all agree even on God. They don't agree on their concept of God. They don't agree on moral ideas. So he actually went back to some of the ancient skeptical claims saying, you know, we look at the diversity of humankind. We look at the diversity of beliefs and senses. And we can't say that there is actually, there are these universals. And he also thought, I think, and argued that believing in an AIDS ideas makes us lazy. It's a cover for just accepting certain kinds of prejudices and accepting what we're told. on authority. And actually if we think of ourselves as forming beliefs and concepts, then we're able to scrutinize

those and actually test them. And that's better for our mental understanding to do that. Were there a sense of public debate between him and them, as it were? Oh, yes. I think it was quite a public issue, really. And as I said, also a private issue in the sense that they lock interacted

with Cudworth and others. But it was, I mean, in part, quite a blistering debate in the halls of science as well as in the public domain. Alexander Brodie, can we bring the French philosopher René Descartes to the table literally now? Can you tell us what part he played in this?

Well, Descartes played a particularly important part in all of this, both in fact and according to the version of the history of philosophy that everybody has taught these days, which is a history of philosophy that we're, was in effect dictated by Thomas Reed, and we have simply swallowed the story ever since. Why Descartes is so important in this story is that he wanted to found science upon an absolutely certain base. He needed some propositional propositions that nobody could deny under any circumstance, and he eventually found such a proposition, namely the one affirming his own

existence. And his philosophy develops from that. Cogito ergo sum. And the crucial phrase there is sum, I exist. He is starting, and he's starting where, in his own head. His problem is that this doesn't seem a very suitable place for founding as a basis for science, because the science he was talking out was all going on outside his head. It was about the real world. So his big question, philosophically.

was how to get outside his head. And he managed this by constructing a series of arguments for the existence, not only of a God, but of a God who has all the perfections, including the moral perfections, and who is therefore not a deceiving God, therefore is a God who would not deceive Descartes into believing certain things when they are completely false. So with the help of God, Descartes gets outside of his head.

head. Now just a second, staying in his head for a moment, it's interesting the way that he got to the basic notion. I think therefore I exist, or I think therefore I am, which I, and can you describe how he did that? Because it's interesting. It's interesting and very important, again, for the history of philosophy. He started with beliefs, which roughly speaking are common sense beliefs in the sense that Professor Grayling has just outlined. For instance, two arms two legs. For example, two arms

and two legs, you're sitting just in front of me. And realize that actually such propositions as these are doubtful or doubtable because we know very well that sometimes our sensory receptors serve as ill

as well, just as our memory can serve as ill as well as well. And this means that those sources of information, which tell us about the outside world now and the outside world in the past, are not entirely reliable. So he goes on doubting and doubting until he finds something that can no longer be doubted because to doubt the proposition in question, namely his own existence,

and the fact that he is doubting is, in effect, to affirm the proposition that he's trying to deny. So when he comes to the doubt about his own existence, that's proof that he exists. The very fact that he is doubting his own existence proves that there is himself a thinking thing because doubting is a form of thinking, and so there is thinking going on,

and so there must be a thinker who is at it. But then he had the trouble, and I interrupted you, I'll brought you back, I apologize for that, except I don't, because it was very interesting, about proving, getting outside his head. and he invented the perfect God and the perfect God

well you said well he got outside his head by noticing that there were inside this head of his a number of ideas and amongst the ideas was the idea of God and the question was then is it possible

to argue from the idea of God to the reality of God the existence of God so not merely a mental existence but a real existence not just an existence it depends upon an activity of Descartes' mind, but a God who has to exist for Descartes mind to exist. Would this be called scepticism, or was it at the time called scepticism?

No, this wasn't at all skepticism. Descartes wasn't being skeptical about anything in the process of his doubt, and he didn't end up a skeptic nor needed to if his proof about the existence of God was correct. the existence of a non-deceiving God was a guarantee for Descartes that the external world existed and this was just as well for him given his large programme of trying to construct

a firm basis for science Anthony Grayling we come to, well I come to him in this and the David Hume 18th century of Scotland Bon vivour philosopher historian darling of the Edinburgh chattering classes but can you tell us how he took it forward or how he entered into this discussion on common sense.

Well, Alexander's just been telling us there about how Descartes got going, what came to be called in the 17th and 18th century, the way of ideas, the fact that what you have immediately before the mind in experience is ideas, and from these you've got to get out of your head to an external world,

and that's where you need some kind of guarantor, in the case of Descartes, the goodness of a deity who doesn't ever deceive you. In the case of Locke and Barclay, who were empiricist, philosophers, a different route had to be engineered from the experience inside your head to this external world. Locke tried to do it by saying that there are certain properties of things, what he called their primary qualities, the qualities of objects that you can measure,

their position, their dimension, how big they are, how many they are, and so on, which give us direct access to objects outside our heads. And so there's a bridge and experience to the external world. And Berkeley, in a... and you might call it a mad, but at the same time beautifully argued case pointed out that, in fact, those ideas in our minds, ideas of secondary qualities, the colours and textures and so on the things, are on an experiential par, if you like, with these primary qualities. And so, in fact, our objects are collections of experience qualities, and these experienced qualities can only exist in the mind. and this left Hume with the very interesting problem that if you're going to be a very rigorous and thoroughgoing empiricist

and you're really going to base everything on your experience, you're going to have to trace every one of your ideas or concepts to what he called an impression, either of sense or an internal impression, from which these ideas and concepts originate. So if you're going to be very, very thorough going on your empiricism, you've got to base everything on experience, You've got to try to locate the roots of all your beliefs, all your ideas, all your concepts, to experience, the experience of these impressions, whether you refer them to an outer source or to an inner source.

And his successes in the philosophical tradition and his contemporaries, including among them Thomas Reed, thought that this landed him in a universal skepticism. Because Hume himself said in the first book of his treatise, he said, there is no way of proof. the existence of an external world or the validity of inductive reasoning or the fact that I have a self or that there is some necessary connection between a cause and its effect on the basis of this

very, very austere resource which is tracing our concepts to the originating impressions. Melissa Laine did he think, did Hume think the senses were trustworthy? Was this a problem that he had? Well Hume as Anthony has been saying Hume was

on the one hand committed to the notion that that is how all of our information has to come in. So we got all the information from our five senses. Well, but, I mean, he is at the same time, I think very aware of the ancient arguments, the ancient skeptical arguments known as Pyrrhenism, that the senses do actually give us contradictory information all the time. So, you know, if I see a stick in water, it looks bent. And that was a famous ancient example.

And Hume also gave the example of the diminishing table. So if I moved farther and farther away from the table, the table would seem to be getting smaller. So for Hume, this was, we had to accept that the senses, on the one hand, did give us these contradictory impressions, but at the same time we then have to work through the understanding, and the mind has to sort of try to sort that out and create a notion of an external world despite that.

Alexander Brody, Hume was based in Edinburgh, but there was a philosophy club in Aberdeen with the Minister of the Kirk there, Thomas Reed, and they discussed ideas, particularly Hume's ideas. can you tell us what Reid made of Hume's ideas and how he responded to them? Hume's ideas went down in a sense very well indeed in Aberdeen in the Wise Club of the Philosophical Society because Hume gave them something to talk about and there is a famous letter from Reed to Hume in which he tells Hume to keep publishing because otherwise they'll run out of things to talk about

So that all we have the paradoxical situation that the wise club in Aberdeen was a fan club of Humes, while at the same time being totally opposed to his ideas. The reason that they were opposed to his ideas is that the Abidonians were not sceptics, and they reckoned that Hume was very much a skeptic. For example, to pick up the point that has been made, both by Antonet and Melissa, Hume was interested in the question of the proof of the external world. And it's not just that he couldn't find a proof of the external world. He was locked into position by the way of ideas that he had adopted.

Within his own system, what were real were things in the mind, what he called perceptions, impressions and ideas. And this was absolutely all that he had. had to work with. And in that case, if there is an external world, this has got to be a world that is somehow constructed out of impressions and ideas. So the position that Hume adopts on the interpretation of philosophers such as common read, the position that Hume adopts is that what we are pleased to think of as reality, what we fondly imagine gets along quite nicely without us, the outside world, is in fact that.

fact, almost entirely a construction of our own imagination going to work on the impressions and the ideas that we have. And that means that in effect, each of us is a creator of the world. We are all of us world makers. And so that the world, the external world, stands to us, roughly in the way in which a novel stands to an author. And it's not surprising in that case sit on several occasions in his philosophical magnum opus, the treatise of human nature, Hume speaks of the external world as a fiction. And he means fiction in the modern sense. It's something that we have made, something that we have created. And that clearly is a skepticism in a very tough sense.

Anthony, and then I want to go to Melissa. Well, well, here you see Melvin and our listeners find themselves fallen among thieves, you see, because here is a point of, of to philosophers at any rate absolutely vital interest as to whether this indeed is what Hume was trying to say because a slightly alternative picture to this would be to say that what Hume was skeptical about was the possibility of rationalists with the capital R philosophy to provide us with arguments.

I mean, philosophy is an enterprise of reason which could provide us with proofs of the existence of an external world and causality and so on. Because, of course, he also says in the treatise that when he gets up from his study desk and goes off to play backgammon, which was his favorite occupation, he couldn't help but believe that there is an external world. And so what he was implying there was that our human nature, this is why his book was called a treatise of human nature,

actually equips us with convictions about these very, very basic things, like the existence of an external world, which cannot be called into question. It was this insight that the great Emmanuel Count picked up on and turned into, as you would expect from a Tutin, a tremendous elaborate philosophical system. So it may be that Hume wasn't at all a skeptic about the external world, but about the pretensions of reason to prove it. Can I come to Minnesota what, just to say

a little bit more about Reed, because he was very influential in this, and he wrote in book 764, inquiring into the human mind on the principles of common sense. And it was a very influential book. Can you, how, what was common sense philosophers developed by Reed, Ms. Lleyn? Well, it's interesting.

Hume read a draft of the inquiry and wrote in a letter that this was reviving innate ideas. So Hume took it that Reed was just going backwards, back to the Cambridge Platoness and the innate ideas. But that wasn't at all what Reed took himself to be doing, or not exactly that. Because Reed rejected this very notion of the ideas, the way of ideas that's been mentioned, the thought that the only thing that's real is the impressions in our mind from the outside world. He wanted to restore a direct connection between ourselves and external reality. And he did that by these common sense principles. So he does have innate somethings. They're innate

principles, but they're precisely not innate ideas in that sort of lock and hume sense. And so for Reed, the common sense principles are principles like you exist and have a mind. This table is real. I exist. I can have reason to trust my senses and testimony generally. And Reed actually picked up the phenelon thought to say that people who deny these really are either lunatics or what he called metaphysical lunatics. They are these mad philosophers because, in fact, We can't ever reason or think without these premises. So we have to accept that this is part of the constitution of our minds. Thanks, Anna Brod.

Do you want to come into it, as you know, the Scottish representative at this table, what became a national quarrel? Can you just develop what Minister and Anthony have said about this? Yes. Firstly, and perhaps mainly, I would like to respond in a Redean kind of way to Anthony's interpretation of the history of philosophy. in that Anthony's report is obviously perfectly correct that on the one hand there was Hume writing his philosophy

in the course of which he was declaring the external world and therefore all his friends to be a fiction, a product of his own mind. And on the other hand, he was leaving his closet where he was writing his philosophy and going out and playing backgammon and talking with his friends. Now... In the real world, in the common sense world. In the common sense world, in the real world, exactly that.

Now, for Reed, this means that there is something seriously dislocated going on. As far as Reed is concerned, what this demonstrates is that there's something desperately wrong with Hume's philosophy, because it's not a philosophy that you can live. If you actually do think that your friends are products of your own imaginative activities, and that's the end of the story, then you can't possibly treat them in the kind of way that nature. forces you to treat them, namely as other centres of consciousness and centres of moral principle and so on. And it's an essential part of the philosophical insight of the common-sense school that there should be a unity between the life that you live in the real world and

the philosophy that you practice, sorry, the philosophy that you theorise about. So Hume's life demonstrates the weakness of his philosophy. Well, Melissa, you're both versed in. Okay, go on the first. Well, there is a paradox, so just as Kant and Hume in one way could be brought together, as Anthony suggested earlier, so in a way, human Reed could in another sense be brought together. And there was a wonderful 19th century Edinburgh's story that said that really what happened was that Reed was shouting out very loudly, we must believe in an external world, but we have no reason for our beliefs, whispering.

And then Hume was saying very loudly, we have no reason for our beliefs and whispering, but we must believe in an external world. so there's a sense in which one can argue about are they in some way saying the same thing Can I second that sorry Melm because I think that's exactly We're having a meeting yet back in the Winesh Club and how we do you? Because Alexander is absolutely right

Of course that is exactly what Thomas Reid did think and this was the great talking point but in its way they were as Melissa suggests talking past one another because they're much much closer than they thought they were and it was I think Hume in his letter to a friend mutual acquaintance between him and Reed,

talking about the inquiry, which was the first of Reed's works, and Hume didn't have an opportunity to see the more developed works that Reid offered, had taken Reed to misunderstand him when he talked about the way that the empiricist project had to be worked out, the fact that the only equipment we have before consciousness are these ideas and the impressions from which they originate. that if you were going to try to make a philosophical case for saying that basic beliefs were all in order and were fundamental and that you could reason from them, that you were giving

too much to philosophy, that what you should instead be giving the laurel to was just the way human nature is built. It's not a matter of philosophy. It's not a matter of reasoning or argument at all. It's just a matter of responding to the experience that we have. Can I just come back before we move on, Alexander Broder to this notion that if you have a philosophy should be philosophy that you live, live by. Was that notion very much around? Was re-going back to that notion that you have to live the philosophy that you write about that you think is the interpretation of the world?

It's an ancient philosophical concept. Greek philosophy has this very well developed as well, that a philosophy that does not articulate with what we naturally think of as the real world, has got something seriously wrong with it. Melissa. Having suggested that there are ways in which human read are very similar, I think it is important also to say there are some ways that they are very different on some points. And for example, in this question of the relation to God and miracles,

so Hume had argued that we have no grounds on which to believe in ancient biblical reports of miracles because there's no reason for us to trust that testimony unless we have experience of its reliability. And Reed really countered that saying, actually, testimony is just as basic a way of knowing about the world as our senses are, and in fact, we need to have a principle. We can't escape having a principle of believing in testimony. And so there were some real differences between them.

This perturbation of thought in Scotland broke out of, came across the wall and across the sea, and decided to make waves across Europe, but most particularly, as you've already mentioned, undergrailing, with Immanuel Kant. I think that you're on your own, you three from now onwards, with Manuel Kant, and his critique of pure reason, see what I mean? His critique is critical of pure reason.

How did that develop the idea of common sense, and was he directly influenced by reading Hugh? Well, Kant was certainly influenced directly by what he had heard of Hume. Kant was one of those philosophers who probably didn't actually weed and study very carefully his predecessors, but he read about them. and he claimed to have been inspired, indeed to have been woken up from his dogmatic slumbers by this idea that it is the way our human nature is constituted that gives us our most fundamental beliefs about the world and responses to them.

And Kant, as I say, turned this into a very, very elaborate and extremely powerful, interesting system of thought. And he did it on the basis of a crucial change, whereas the empiricist before his time had asked, where do our ideas come from in order to try to locate the authoritative source of them? If they came from your neighbour next door over the garden fence

hanging out of the washing, then they weren't very reliable. But if they came through your five senses, then they were reliable. And Kant said, no, don't ask that question, where do they come from? Ask instead, what work do they do? A bit like John F. Kennedy, you know, and don't ask whether you can do for your country and so on. And so he picked out a set of very, very fundamental

and very, very general concepts which he called categories, because they're so integral to all our thought, to all the possibility of experience indeed. And he said, these are constitutive, structural features of our minds. We didn't, the concept of

objects in space existing independently of us, the fact that they are in causal interaction with one another, the fact that there is a plurality of them, one or many of them. Non-fictional. Yeah. And we are committed to taking it that the world is like that,

that it has these objects, that they are caused, related, because if we didn't have these concepts, then we just couldn't be having experience at all. Alexander Brennan. I think Thomas Reed would certainly say yes to some of the ideas of Immanuel Kant that Anthony has just mentioned, but at the same time, I think he would say no to some quite basic things about Emmanuel Kant's position, and most especially he would certainly interpret Kant as being a continuator of the treasurer.

tradition of the way of ideas. And that's because Kant speaks on almost every page of the first critique, the critique of pure reason, of representations in the mind. And the point about these representations in the mind, so they are mental events or mental acts, is that they are quite orderly. They are not completely chaotic. And his question was, how is it that they are orderly? The point about the orderliness is that it's through these representations as ordered that we know the world

and really that this is what the external world is all about. But two things about this. One of them is that one of the bases of this thought are the representations which are in the mind, which are Descartes's ideas and Hume's impressions and ideas. And the other thing is the principles of ordering, which are what I'm, Anthony has just been speaking about, namely the a priori categories of the mind, such things as the external substances and the relationship of causality. So again, it's all coming from the mind.

And in that sense, for Emmanuel Kant, what we are doing is making the world that we live in. There is a point, if I can just jump in for Melissa there here, just the point of clarification, which is if you think about the word representation, re-presentation, that somehow on the screen of the mind, pictures of a world out there which we don't have direct access to

are being played out. So there is this virtual reality in the head, and that this is a theme through everything we've been saying. And that is precisely what Thomas Reid rejected. He didn't think that there was an intermediary a veil of ideas. It wasn't the case that we were locked away inside our craniums and there we were seeing

this television show going on in external world. He really thought that we had direct access to the world outside. And this is a key point for understanding him and his difference from both human and from Kant. Melissa Lane, the utilitarians would seem to have had a lot to offer to common sense philosophy. Jeremy

Bentham's introduction to the principles of moral and legislation in 1789. What did they bring, what did they bring to this argument? Well, there's a sort of paradox here because in one way one might say that, well, the utilitarians are looking for the sort of one

big, great principle of common sense that they that no one can deny, which is that the rule of our action should be to do that, which increases the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But on the other hand, they didn't think that that was something that everybody actually did agree to. They thought that that was something that people might disagree about, and we have to use it as a skeptical weapon, or a kind of critical weapon, rather, against a lot of the ordinary prejudices, assumptions, conventions. So on the one hand, there's that relation. But the other thing that happened is that one of Reed's successors, Sir William Hamilton was developing Reed's ideas in the 19th century,

and John Stuart Mill, one of the great utilitarians, launched a blistering attack on him in a book, and it was probably that attack which really put paid to common sense philosophy, at least in Britain. So there's a kind of paradoxical relation. We've left out the religious element in Reed's thinking. He was a minister of the church, Anthony Grayle, and that obviously, I'm told that almost every page of his book,

the word God appears. How did that link up? with inatism? Well, I'm not sure what they have direct the connection is with an inatist doctrine, but there is certainly a kind of political background to this, which is that the

Aberdonians, and Alexander is going to put us straight in this. He is a great authority on this matter. Were committed members of I think the Kirk. They were certainly, all of them Christians. And they regarded Hume with respect, but also with a certain tinge of horror, because he was known to be

an atheist. And therefore their charge of skepticism against him wasn't only one that related to epistemology, but also to the faith. Hume, by the way, in this discussion, as Melissa was talking a bit earlier, about miracles, said it's quite a mistake to think that the age of miracles as long past because one miracle remains, and that is the miracle that anybody still believes. And so it was this, of course, which I think irritated the sensibilities of the Abidonians. And they assimilated the idea of skepticism about the external world to skepticism about the existence of a deity. And I think therefore, and Alexander will put us right on this, a great deal of the thrust of what the common sense school was doing was to make room for the idea

that a belief in the existence of a deity and providence was part of the common sense furniture that any ordinary mind would be equipped with. Alexander, you've been Aisha Gherding has passed on the baton quite neatly. Yes, I think there are one or two things to say about what I had to has said, if I may start with Hume, I think Anthony and I can have a discussion as to whether Hume was or was not an atheist.

I'm not sure it was possible for Hume to have been an atheist. Hume was a skeptic about almost everything, and I think he was a skeptic on matters of religion as well. The phrase attenuated deist is quite often used to describe

Hume's position. That's to say that what he does in his main work on religion, dialogues concerning natural religion is not at any point raise even the question whether God exists but instead what he does is ask whether there are good arguments

for the existence of God and he says in effect well there aren't any good arguments for the existence of God so what that does is undercut is undercut a most important swath of theological argument that's been going on for centuries. But on the other hand, there were Calvinists who were quite pleased at the conclusion of Hume's position because they thought that it's all a matter of faith in the blood of Christ.

In any case, and not at all a matter of argument and reason whether you believe in the existence of God. And so you have space created for a form of Fideism, if that's what you want. So Hume hasn't stopped that. It's just that he's prevented something else. He's scared. about the power of reason, which he keeps describing as a frail intellectual organ. Can I ask you, this as we come towards the end of this programme, where you think the influence of common sense philosophy has been much profound? Well, there's quite a profound influence, for example, in G.E. Moore, another Cambridge philosopher, but in the early 20th century, one of the apostles, who made a very similar sort of argument

to the ones that Reid was making. So he said, if we have the proposition, there is at present a living, at present a living body, which is my body, he said it would just be lunacy to deny that. And he sort of held up his hand and said, you can't deny that this is a hand. So that notion, and that, in some ways, one can see that that idea that there are some things that it's just crazy to question,

and it just doesn't make any sense for us to question that we couldn't live it. In a broader sense, also that feeds into some of the ideas of the later Wittgenstein as well. Yes, that's exactly right. I mean, more famously, of course, even the title of honor of his works, in defense of common sense,

is a direct inheritor of this tradition and indeed Wittgenstein in his last work, uncertainty, is also an inheritor via Moor of Reed's ideas, again indirectly. But there's a famous case in which more, having used such examples as, I know that I have a hand here and another hand there, and I know that I've been, you know, close to the surface of the earth all my life and so on.

Almost all my life, is it? Yes, he was getting almost. Giving a lecture at an American university in a great hall, the walls of which were hung with, curtains. And he said, I know with absolute certainty that there are windows behind these curtains and in fact there weren't. And this just shows you how risky common sense

is. Finally, where do you think its influences most felt at the moment, Alexander Brody? Well, it is very often spoken of with respect, if not all, in the United States where

Thomas Reid has now been taken over in a very major way and particularly by philosophers within the reformed community and partly I think because of a certain field of philosophy known as foundationalism, that there are foundational beliefs and their theology accepts foundationalism as a fundamental part of it. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thanks, Mr. Lane, Alexander Brody and A.C. Grayling.

next week we'll be looking at Permian Triassic boundary in geological time when 96% of life on Earth became extinct. Thanks for listening. Good morning. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.