Although Thomas Reid was a widely influential figure in British, American and European intellectual life, with editions of his work appearing regularly throughout the nineteenth century, he has been largely overlooked by twentieth-century intellectual historians and cultural critics, and his reputation has only recently undergone a revival among philosophers. In large part, this can be attributed to the dominance of a German-centred narrative of the history of ideas which actively discouraged scholars from studying Reid's writings. Reid, along with other thinkers influenced by him, was contemptuously dismissed by Kant in his “Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics”, although recent scholarship has shown that Kant's supposed …

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