Abstract
We now come to the problem of what Reid’s view of the nature of the person is. The problem is presented in section I and arises from Reid’s apparent acceptance of the view that persons both have minds and have bodily characteristics, coupled with his statement that a person is indivisible. In section II it is argued that a whole man, or whole woman, view of the person in Reid is not ruled out by his insistence on indivisibility of the person. In section III it is pointed out that it may be Reid’s position that the possibility of a totally disembodied existence for persons cannot be ruled out, since some varieties of disembodied personal existence are conceivable. In section IV it is conceded that Reid sometimes openly declares, in Inquiry VI for example, that the mind is an unextended and indivisible substance. But it is contended that this declaration only plays a marginally important role in the discussions in which it occurs. And in section V it is contended that this declared position makes for grave difficulties in accommodating some central views of Reid’s on thought and on action alongside a totally disembodied mental or personal existence.
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Notes
Lome Falkenstein, ‘Hume and Reid on the Simplicity of the Soul’, Hume Studies XXI, Number 1, April 1995, pp25–45.
Falkenstein rightly says in ‘Hume and Reid on the Simplicity of the Soul’, p40: [Reid] proposed that what is in the mind is an act performed by the mind, not a component contained within it, and that what is in the mind may refer to extended objects in virtue of some sort of intentional directedness. But he claims, with perhaps less justification, that this model is owing to Reid’s adherence to the view that the mind could not be extended. ‘Perhaps because of this, he claimed that our sensations could not be extended. And, perhaps because of this, he in turn claimed that, since we obviously do know extension, representation must not require the inherence of resembling sensations in the mind.’(p40) But surely this view has matters the wrong way round. I would contend that the active nature of the mind forces representation into the mould of action, as well as making the mind utterly unlike inert matter.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Yolton, Dent and Dutton 1961, II,XXVII,15: For should the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince’s past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler as soon as deserted by his own soul, everyone sees he would be the same person with the prince, accountable only for the prince’s actions; but who would say it was the same man?
A passage to which Haldane has rightly drawn attention in a review of recent commentaries on Reid.
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© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Gallie, R.D. (1998). The Nature of Persons. In: Thomas Reid: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Anatomy of the Self. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 78. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9020-4_5
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