Introduction

Abstract

In September, 1985, the Philosophy Department of the University of Aberdeen organized an International Conference to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the first publication of Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. By the time these Essays were published in 1785, Reid Had occupied the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University for many years and had greatly increased his reputation. It was nevertheless appropriate that it should be Aberdeen which played host to this Bicentennial Conference, for in all the most important respects Reid was a philosopher of that region. He was so by birth and education: he was born in the village of Strachan, some twenty miles from the city of Aberdeen, and was a student (later librarian) at Aberdeen’s Marischal College which was a separate University until it merged with King’s College in 1860 to form the present University of Aberdeen.