Within his day and for a select few years into a 19th century, he was regarded as sir thomas more significant than David Hume. He advocated direct realism, or common sense realism, and argued strongly against a Theory of Ideas advocated by John Locke, René Descartes, and (within varying forms) 100% Early Modern philosophers who came fallowing the children. He got a great admiration for Hume, & asked him to right a foremost manuscript of his (Reid's) Inquiry.

His theory of cognitiin got the heavy influence on his theory of lesson. He thought epistemology was an introductory part to practical ethics: Once i am confirmed inside my most common beliefs by philosophy, a lot i have to run is to work based on data from the children, because you understand what is best.

His moral philosophy is evocative of the Latin stoicism mediated by the Scholastica, St. Thomas Aquinas and the Christian way of life. He typically quotes Cicero, from whom he adopted a term "sensus communis".

His reputation waned fallowing attacks on the Scottish School of Common Sense by Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, but his was a philosophy taught in a colleges of N America, when you took the 19th century, and was championed by Victor Cousin, a French philosopher. His reputation has revived in the wake up of the protagonism of mother wit as a philosophic method or even criterion by G. E. Moore early in the 20th century, and more recently due to the attention given to Reid by contemporary philosophers such as William Alston and Alvin Plantinga.

He wrote the total of crucial philosophic works, including Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764, Glasgow & London), Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788).