Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid. Two Common-Sense Philosophers (review)

269 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Denudata and of Philo Judaeus that she specifically refers to. The editor is so anxious to make her relevant for twentieth century thinkers that the bibliography (6o) contains no work of More's, but does contain five works of modern analytic thinkers. (Also unfortunately, each reference to Carolyn Merchant's article in this journal is given to Vol. VII instead of Vol. XVII where it appears.) The text, with its brilliant critique of Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza, especially in chapter 8 and 9, is readable by itself. It would be enhanced by relevant materials from her sources. One may hope, now that Lady Anne Conway has been rediscovered and the text made available, that her work will be studied further and explicated more completely; maybe she will be given her rightful place as a major figure in seventeenth century thought who greatly influenced the Cambridge Platonists , Leibniz, and, perhaps, also Henry More's friend and associate, Sir Isaac Newton , who apparently held to a spiritual cosmology much like that of the Viscountess of Conway. RICHARD H. POPKIN Washington University Louise Marcil-Lacoste. Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid. Two Common-SensePhilosophers. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas, No. 3. Kingston and Montreal: McGilI-Queen's University Press, 1982, Pp. vi + 227. $27.5 o. The most notable thing in this book is its attempt to show systematic and detailed unity, since there have been students of Reid who thought that they had found something near to complete separation--between Reid as philosopher of common sense and as inductivist in the philosophy of mind. "Reid's appeal to common sense is an appeal to induction" (p. 12o). Part of what is summed up in this assertion is the not very contentious view that Reid saw the principles of common sense as reached by generalization from particular cases; thus, for example, underlying one of Reid's "first principles of contingent truths"--the existence of whatever I am conscious of--are such undeniable particular facts as that this felt pain exists. But far more is maintained. A central thesis of the book is that Reid's treatment of self-evidence is governed by the first maxim of Newton's Regulae Philosophandi: "What we take to account for many phenomena ought to be real and adequate to the effects." According to this thesis, Reid "treats the notion of self-evidence on the model of an unknown efficient cause whose effects are discernible in the ways we assent to certain propositions" (lO2). Self-evidence is for Reid a self-sufficient cause of assent unknown in itself, known only by its effects, on all fours, consequently, with the causes belonging to the domain of natural philosophy. The putatively self-evident is established as being in fact self-evident by the elimination of other assent-producing "causes" 0o5) , such as reasoning, custom, and prejudice, leaving as the only antecedent to assent the apprehension of a proposition. How did "Reid's treatment of self-evidence" (and therefore his grounding of common-sense beliefs) meet the reality and adequacy conditions of the Newtonian BOOK REVIEWS 263 rule? The reality condition was met by his dealing with what does happen in human judgments, not with what "could happen," "given this or that theory of self-evidence" (13o). No such clear indication as to how the adequacy condition was met is given in the summarizing words that it was met "by showing that assent to self-evident propositions was self-sufficient, that it was immediately produced upon the apprehension or the conception of the proposition" (13o). That is, pre-theoretically, what selfevidence is; one would have expected something about the explanatory satisfactoriness of a causal view of self-evidence. And one wishes that a resolute attempt had been made to show that such a view meets either the adequacy or the reality condition in the interpretation of Reid. One also wishes that this view would explain or illuminate what Reid says or the positions he takes up, or that there would be positive evidence that he held this view. No objections are envisaged and disposed of, such as, for example, that a...