Reid's bodies

Though Reid presents himself as a defender of common sense, in his mature writings, he ends up defending a very uncommonsensical view: that we do not perceive bodies. This unfortunate result has its roots in a Lockean muddle about substratum. The first section introduces this topic. The second section reviews a 2015 paper in which M. Folescu portrays Reid as waffling between a “qualities only” view of perception and a “qualities and bodies” view. Stuart finds the evidence adduced for both sides inconclusive. The third section argues that in Essays on the Intellectual Powers and Essays on the Active Powers , Reid maintains that we perceive only qualities and not the things to which they belong. Our conceptions of body and of mind are, he says, relative and obscure. The fourth section argues that we cannot take at face value Reid’s remark about infants perceiving their parents, a passage cited by Folescu in support of the “qualities and bodies” reading. For Reid’s considered position is that infants and young children lack the cognitive abilities needed to distinctly conceive of bodies and even to believe in their existence. The essay concludes by considering and rejecting the possibility that Reid thinks that bodies are the objects of what he calls acquired perception.