Louis Arnaud Reid

Intellectual Analysis and Æsthetic Appreciation

The purpose of the following article is to suggest certain problems, rather than to offer philosophical solutions of problems. I propose to state certain questions which are sometimes asked and to try to say both ( a ) why it is important that they should be asked, and ( b ) why, if we do ask them, we should endeavour to answer them as accurately as we can. A full discussion of what the true answers to the questions are will be beyond the province of this paper, and, if certain answers are suggested in passing, it will only be because it is difficult to make anything which consists of a mere sequence of questions at all interesting or readable.

Philosophy In the Inter-War Period: A Memoir

The following extracts come from a memoir of philosophical life between the wars and after, written in the 1970s by the Anglo-Scottish philosopher Louis Arnaud Reid (1895–1986).2 Today Reid is best known for his writings on aesthetics, and as the holder of the foundation chair in the philosophy of education at the University of London. Reid will also be familiar to those who have read A.J. Ayers account of Ayers appointment to the chair of philosophy at London, for Reid was the candidate strongly preferred by the philosophers on the selection committee.3 Reid regretted the rise of logical positivism in the later 1930s because it introduced a break with the earlier world of humane philosophical discourse. In these extracts, edited by his grandson, Reid begins by giving a sense of the breadth of topics covered in philosophical conferences in the 1920s, before sketching some of the characters involved. He mentions of course a number of figures still familiar to us, from Moore to Russell to Wittgenstein, but tries more generally to give an impression of a philosophical world which is now largely lost. These are themes he continues elsewhere in the book, where he discusses the people he knew at Edinburgh, Aberystwyth, Liverpool, Newcastle and London.

On Talking about the Arts

I want to concentrate on two kinds of talking about the arts. One concerns those aspects of the language of philosophical aesthetics in which generalisations about ‘art’ and ‘the arts’ are made. The other concerns the language of the critic in so far as it can be stated as having a very particular aim: ‘the stimulation’ (in, say, a reader) ‘of interest and the heightening of insight and the education of his ability to make his own appreciative judgments from direct experience’.