Louis Arnaud Reid

Louis Arnaud Reid (18 February 1895 - 26 January 1986) was a British philosopher who held the foundation chair in Philosophy of Education at the London University Institute of Education. He was a founding contributor to the ''British Journal of Aesthetics'', and is best known for his writings on epistemology and aesthetics. He influenced figures as diverse as Susanne Langer, Lionel Trilling and Harold Osborne. Jacques Barzun said that Reid's book ''A Study in Aesthetics'' was "the best discussion of art yet produced in our century."

As A.J. Ayer recounts in his autobiography, Reid is also remembered as the candidate preferred by the philosophers on the appointment committee for the chair in philosophy at the University of London. The philosophers were outvoted by the lay members of the committee, who appointed Ayer instead.

Reid was born in the manse at Ellon, north of Aberdeen, the descendant of Presbyterian and later Free Church ministers. He later became an Anglican and later still an agnostic. He went to school at the Leys in Cambridge, where he knew Mr Chips, and then briefly flirted with the idea of a career in engineering. He also volunteered as a sapper in the Royal Engineers early in the First World War, though he was invalided out on the basis of rheumatic fever.

It was at about this period that he first read Bergson, and found his vocation in philosophy, going on to study at Edinburgh from which he graduated in 1919. His first lectureship was at Aberystwyth, during which time he wrote the (realist) PhD which became his first book, under the supervision of the leading idealist, J.H. Muirhead. From Aberystwith he moved to Liverpool as a senior lecturer in 1926, and then in 1932 to a chair in philosophy at the Armstrong College, Newcastle, a college of Durham University.

In 1947 he was invited to move to the Institute in London, where he remained until his retirement in 1962. He continued to write and teach for many years afterwards. Provided by Wikipedia