Thomas Reid's Lectures on the Fine Arts (review)

534 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY action of a force, e.g., my own volition, therefore representing the only case for Berkeley where real and apparent motion may be distinguished. At any rate, this is an impressive book as well as a first. Unfortunately, it is marred by several misprints and other errors. I counted over 230 including misplaced references, inaccuracies in quotations, and misspellings of authors' names in references. Also, the book needs an index. Anyway, we finally have a book on Berkeley's philosophy of science. As suggested in this review, it will be a center of discussion for some time to come. LAWRENCE A. MIRARCEII Hartwick College Thomas Reid's Lectures on the Fine Arts. By Peter Kivy. International Archives of the History of Ideas, Series Minor no. 7. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Pp. viii + 57) For much too long a time Thomas Reid was a neglected figure in the history of philosophy , but there has been a steady, if not yet sufficiently strong, revival of interest in Reid and the Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense during the past few years. Reid's published works have all become available again in the past four or five years, but a mass of manuscript material has remained inaccessible to most philosophers and scholars interested in Reid and Scottish studies. Professor Kivy's edition of The Edinburgh University Library manuscript of Reid's lectures on aesthetics and the fine arts is therefore an important addition to the Reid corpus. The lectures were apparently written in 1774 while Reid was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, where he had succeeded Adam Smith in the professorship in 1764, the same year in which his Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles oJ Common Sense had appeared. The Lectures on the Fine Arts are thus temporally almost at mid-point between Reid's Inquiry and his Essays on the Intellectual Powers o/ Man (1785. The manuscript consists of 84 pages numbered 1-85 (page 10 is missing) plus 13 pages of interleaves. The manuscript was not intended for publication; it contains virtually no punctuation and many words are abbreviated. Professor Kivy has improved the readability of the manuscript by spelling out abbreviations, eliminating archaic, and not entirely consistent, capitalization of nouns and, where occasionally necessary, inserting a word or phrase in square brackets. A number of major textual and editorial problems are noted and explained carefully in footnotes. By and large, Dr. Kivy's editorial interventions are unobtrusive and helpful. Professor J. Charles Robertson of the University of New Brunswick has raised serious doubts about the provenance of the Lectures on the Fine Arts in a review of Kivy's edition of the lectures in Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review. He cites the unpublished research on the mass of Reid manuscript material done by A. W. Bellringer in his Aberdeen doctoral Thesis of 1968 and argues that the manuscript Kivy has published is almost certainly a student note book. Perhaps Robertson is right--I cannot tell. But whatever the provenance of the Lectures on the Fine Arts, there can be no doubt at all that they present us with the substance of Reid's views on aesthetics, as any comparison of the Lectures with Reid's published essay "Of Taste" will show. Even if Reid did not write the manuscript of the Lectures on The Fine Arts, whoever did must have thought of himself as an amanuensis, for the manuscript is clearly an extremely accurate transcription of Reid's very language, as can be discerned by anybody who has read a lot of Reid. So while the problem of provenance is deafly important enough to mention and wants settling for the purposes of historical exactitude, it is not important enough to make very much of from the point of view of Reidian exegesis. The Introduction is unusually, but not inordinately, long. Kivy concentrates on Reid's theory of our perception of aesthetic qualities in relation to Reid's general theory of per- BOOK REVIEWS 535 ception because Reid's aesthetics are part of his over-all philosophy of perception. Unfortunately , he neglects altogether a number of important and interesting topics in aesthetics which Reid...