Search results for ""Author Thomas Reid""

America’s Fortress offers a compelling narrative of the people who envisioned, constructed, and garrisoned this important military installation . . . Reid brings to life the human experience of the fort that pulsated inside the enduring walls of brick and mortar.”—Peter S. Carmichael, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, author of The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and ReunionKnown as the “American Gibraltar,” Fort Jefferson, located in the Dry Tortugas, Florida, was the most heavily armed coastal defense fort in United States history. Perceived as the nation’s leading maximum-security prison, the fort also held several of the accused conspirators in the Lincoln assassination. America’s Fortress is the first book-length, architectural, military, environmental, and political history of this strange and significant Florida landmark. This volume also fills a significant gap in Civil War history with regard to coastal defense strategy, support of the Confederacy blockade, the use of convicted Union soldiers as forced labor, and the treatment of civilian prisoners sentenced by military tribunals. Reid argues that Fort Jefferson’s troops faced very different threats and challenges than soldiers who served elsewhere during the war. He chronicles threats of epidemic tropical disease, hurricanes, shipwrecks, prisoner escapes, and Confederate attack. Reid also reports on white northerners’ perceptions of slaves, slavery, and the emerging free black soldiers of the latter years of the war. Drawing on the writings of Emily Holder, wife of Fort Jefferson’s resident surgeon, Reid is the first to offer a female perspective on life at the fort between 1859 and 1865. For history buffs and tourists, America's Fortress offers a fascinating account of this little-known outpost which has stood for over 150 years off the tip of the Florida Keys.

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Thomas Reid saw the three subjects of logic, rhetoric and the fine arts as closely cohering aspects of one endeavour which he called the culture of the mind. This was a topic on which Reid lectured for many years in Glasgow and the volume is as near a reconstruction of these lectures as is now possible. The material is virtually unknown now but in fact it relates closely to Reid's published works and in particular to the two late ones, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man and Essays on the Active Powers of Man. When composing these volumes, Reid drew primarily on his lectures on 'pneumatology' which presented a theory of the mental powers, broadly conceived. These lectures were basic to the course on the culture of the mind which explained the cultivation of the mental powers. Although the Essays also included some elements from the material on the culture of the mind, the bulk of the latter was left in manuscript form and Professor Broadie's edition restores this important extension of Reid's overall work. In addition, this volume continues the Edinburgh Edition's attractive combination of manuscript material and published work, in this case Reid's important and well known essay on Aristotle's logic. This text was corrupted in older editions of Reid's works and is now restored to the state in which Reid left it. This volume underscores Reid's great and growing significance, viewed both as an historical figure and as a philosopher. At the same time, it is of great interdisciplinary importance. While the material emerges directly from the core of Reid's philosophy, as now understood, it will appeal widely to people in literary, cultural, historical and communications studies. In this regard, the present volume is a true fruit of the Scottish Enlightenment.

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A philosopher, scholar of the natural world, and gifted mathematician, Thomas Reid holds a distinctive place in the Scottish Enlightenment. This volume reconstructs Reid’s lifelong engagement with the physical sciences and makes clear why these fields were central to his epistemology and moral and social philosophy.Placing Reid’s “Essay on Quantity” alongside his previously unpublished writings on mathematics and the physical sciences, Paul Wood shows that, in contrast to Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, Reid was a philosopher rooted not only in the science of man but also in the sciences of nature. A self-professed Newtonian, Reid honed his observational and experimental skills while investigating a broad range of theoretical problems in astronomy, mechanics, optics, electricity, and chemistry. He championed the practical application of mathematics, immersed himself in Newton’s mathematical corpus, and addressed foundational questions such as the conceptual basis of Euclidean geometry.Comprehensive and invaluable, this volume demonstrates that Reid built on his own early precociousness in mathematics to become one of the leading mathematicians and natural philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment.

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Thomas Reid was an intellectual polymath interested in all aspects of Enlightenment thought. Paul Wood reconstructs Reid's career as a mathematician and natural philosopher and shows how he grappled with Sir Isaac Newton's scientific legacy.

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The pervasiveness of Protestant natural law in the early modern period and its significance in the Scottish Enlightenment have long been recognised. This book reveals that Thomas Reid (1710-1796) -- the great contemporary of David Hume and Adam Smith -- also worked in this tradition. When Reid succeeded Adam Smith as professor of moral philosophy in Glasgow in 1764, he taught a course covering pneumatology, practical ethics, and politics. This section on practical ethics took its starting point from the system of natural law and rights published by Francis Hutcheson. Knud Haakonssen has reconstructed it here for the first time from Reid's manuscript lectures and papers, and it provides a considerable addition to our understanding not only of Reid but of the thought of the Scottish Enlightenment and of the education system of the time. The present work is a revised version of a work first published by Princeton University Press in 1990 which has long been out of print.

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Reid’s previously published writings are substantial, both in quantity and quality. This edition attempts to make these writings more readily available in a single volume. Based upon Hamilton’s definitive two volume 6th edition, this edition is suitable for both students and scholars.Beanblossom and Lehrer have included a wide range of topics addressed by Reid. These topics include Reid’s views on the role of common sense, scepticism, the theory of ideas, perception, memory and identity, as well as his views on moral liberty, duties, and principles. Historical as well as topical considerations guided the selection process. Thus, Reid’s responses to Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume are included. Through the resulting selections Reid’s influence and impact upon subsequent philosophers is manifested.

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