"[5] As A. J. Ayer recounts in his autobiography, Reid is also remembered as the candidate preferred by the philosophers on the appointment committee for the chair in philosophy at the University of London.
[6] Reid was born in the manse at Ellon, north of Aberdeen, the descendant of Presbyterian and later Free Church ministers.
He went to school at the Leys in Cambridge, where he knew Mr Chips, and then briefly flirted with the idea of a career in engineering.
He also volunteered as a sapper in the Royal Engineers early in the First World War, though he was invalided out on the basis of rheumatic fever.
His first lectureship was at Aberystwyth, during which time he wrote the (realist) PhD which became his first book, under the supervision of the leading idealist, J.H.
[8] This is the view implicit in Locke that when we see an object we in fact see an image (a representation) in our mind which is the product of the stimulation of our optic nerves by light.
The problem with this account is that it makes the image the immediate object of perception, and thus leaves us with no direct evidence of the physical world.
[10] When we see, he argued, we are not ‘seeing’ an image or sense datum in the mind: we are ‘seeing’ the world, albeit not in the direct fashion imagined by the naïve realist.
Imaging can thus be compared to the act by which a blind person constructs an ‘image’ of the external world on the basis of information transmitted through his or her white cane; for though our visual sense is much more sophisticated and appears immediate, it is in fact mediated by light (a physical intermediary like the cane), and involves the same kind of construction.
It follows that there is no problem in understanding how the qualitative aspects of art can embody meaning, given that qualia are paradigmatically mental, and interpretative.
His views were largely developed independently of the Continental phenomenologists, whose works were not well known in Britain in the early inter-war period.