[DeweyCA]

FTA: "Reid’s fundamental insight was that our ability to make sense of our experience presupposes certain first principles. Because these principles are implicit in our conduct and our thought, they cannot be proved; there are no other truths from which they can be derived. However, to deny or even to doubt any of them is to involve ourselves in absurdity. Consequently, the principles of common sense have the special authority of first principles: we cannot operate without them. They are inarguably true and “self-evident.” In Reid’s words (which we have seen quoted by Herman), common-sense judgments are “no sooner understood than they are believed,” because they “carry the light of truth itself.”

(Skip)

"As you know, the American Founders claimed they were guided by self-evident truths. They relied on self-evident truths because their deliberations were deeply informed by the thinking of Thomas Reid. And Reid continued to be at the center of American thought for more than a century. Generations of American academics were common-sense realists, and until the Civil War, every major American collegiate intellectual was a common-sense realist.

Reid is all but forgotten in America today. He is routinely missing from survey courses in philosophy and even from courses in American thought. You may very well have never heard of him. But you don’t have to read his Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense to understand common sense. You already have everything you need for that."

I was unfamiliar with this guy. I would say that his "first principles" are god-given abilities that are present in any normal person - until they are corrupted by modern philosophy, such as Leftism.

[gogeo]

BFL