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In the original 14th century meaning of the term, 'common sense' was a sense like our other senses. It was an internal feeling that was regarded as the common bond that united all the other human senses, the 'five wits' as they were known, and was something akin to what we now call 'heart'.
By the 16th century, the meaning had changed to be more like our present day meaning, that is, 'the plain wisdom that everyone possesses'. I am suer T[indale] is not so farre besydis his comon sencis as to saye the dead bodye hereth Cristis voyce. The one thing that is usually said about common sense is that it isn't as common as it ought to be. This little gag was made as early as , by the political writer Nicholas Amhurst in the satirical text The Secret History of the University of Oxford: There is not said a shrewd wag a more uncommon thing in the world than common sense.
Vico proposed his own anti-Cartesian methodology for a new Baconian science, inspired, he said, by Plato , Tacitus , [71] Francis Bacon and Grotius. In this he went further than his predecessors concerning the ancient certainties available within vulgar common sense. What is required, according to his new science, is to find the common sense shared by different people and nations.
He made this a basis for a new and better-founded approach to discuss Natural Law , improving upon Grotius, John Selden , and Pufendorf who he felt had failed to convince, because they could claim no authority from nature. Unlike Grotius, Vico went beyond looking for one single set of similarities amongst nations but also established rules about how natural law properly changes as peoples change, and has to be judged relative to this state of development. He thus developed a detailed view of an evolving wisdom of peoples. Ancient forgotten wisdoms, he claimed, could be re-discovered by analysis of languages and myths formed under the influence of them.
Contemporary with Hume, but critical of Hume's scepticism, a so-called Scottish school of Common Sense formed, whose basic principle was enunciated by its founder and greatest figure, Thomas Reid:. If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them — these are what we call the principles of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd.
While Reid's interests lay in the defense of common sense as a type of self-evident knowledge available to individuals, this was also part of a defense of natural law in the style of Grotius. He believed that the term common sense as he used it did encompass both the social common sense described by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and the perceptive powers described by Aristotelians.
Reid was criticised, partly for his critique of Hume, by Kant and J. Mill , who were two of the most important influences in nineteenth century philosophy. He was blamed for over-stating Hume's scepticism of commonly held beliefs, and more importantly for not perceiving the problem with any claim that common sense could ever fulfill Cartesian or Kantian demands for absolute knowledge.
Reid furthermore emphasized inborn common sense as opposed to only experience and sense perception. In this way his common sense has a similarity to the assertion of a priori knowledge asserted by rationalists like Descartes and Kant, despite Reid's criticism of Descartes concerning his theory of ideas. Hume was critical of Reid on this point. Despite the criticism, the influence of the Scottish school was notable for example upon American pragmatism , and modern Thomism.
The influence has been particularly important concerning the epistemological importance of a sensus communis for any possibility of rational discussion between people. Immanuel Kant developed a new variant of the idea of sensus communis , noting how having a sensitivity for what opinions are widely shared and comprehensible gives a sort of standard for judgment, and objective discussion, at least in the field of aesthetics and taste:.
The common Understanding of men [ gemeine Menschenverstand ], which, as the mere sound not yet cultivated Understanding, we regard as the least to be expected from any one claiming the name of man, has therefore the doubtful honour of being given the name of common sense [ Namen des Gemeinsinnes ] sensus communis ; and in such a way that by the name common not merely in our language, where the word actually has a double signification, but in many others we understand vulgar, that which is everywhere met with, the possession of which indicates absolutely no merit or superiority.
But under the sensus communis we must include the Idea of a communal sense [ eines gemeinschaftlichen Sinnes ], i.
Kant saw this concept as answering a particular need in his system: But Kant's overall approach was very different from those of Hume or Vico. Like Descartes, he rejected appeals to uncertain sense perception and common sense except in the very specific way he describes concerning aesthetics , or the prejudices of one's " Weltanschauung ", and tried to give a new way to certainty through methodical logic, and an assumption of a type of a priori knowledge.
He was also not in agreement with Reid and the Scottish school, who he criticized in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics as using "the magic wand of common sense", and not properly confronting the "metaphysical" problem defined by Hume, which Kant wanted to be solved scientifically—the problem of how to use reason to consider how one ought to act. Kant used different words to refer to his aesthetic sensus communis , for which he used Latin or else German Gemeinsinn , and the more general English meaning which he associated with Reid and his followers, for which he used various terms such as gemeinen Menscheverstand , gesunden Verstand , or gemeinen Verstand.
According to Gadamer, in contrast to the "wealth of meaning" that Vico and Shaftesbury brought from the Roman tradition into their humanism, Kant "developed his moral philosophy in explicit opposition to the doctrine of "moral feeling" that had been worked out in English philosophy". The moral imperative "cannot be based on feeling, not even if one does not mean an individual's feeling but common moral sensibility".
Kant himself did not see himself as a relativist, and was aiming to give knowledge a more solid basis, but as Richard J. Bernstein remarks, reviewing this same critique of Gadamer:. Once we begin to question whether there is a common faculty of taste a sensus communis , we are easily led down the path to relativism.
And this is what did happen after Kant—so much so that today it is extraordinarily difficult to retrieve any idea of taste or aesthetic judgment that is more than the expression of personal preferences. Ironically given Kant's intentions , the same tendency has worked itself out with a vengeance with regards to all judgments of value, including moral judgments.
Continuing the tradition of Reid and the enlightenment generally, the common sense of individuals trying to understand reality continues to be a serious subject in philosophy. In America, Reid influenced C. Peirce , the founder of the philosophical movement now known as Pragmatism , which has become internationally influential. One of the names Peirce used for the movement was "Critical Common-Sensism".
Peirce, who wrote after Charles Darwin , suggested that Reid and Kant's ideas about inborn common sense could be explained by evolution. But while such beliefs might be well adapted to primitive conditions, they were not infallible, and could not always be relied upon. Another example still influential today is from G.
Moore , several of whose essays, such as the " A Defence of Common Sense ", argued that individuals can make many types of statements about what they judge to be true, and that the individual and everyone else knows to be true. Michael Huemer has advocated an epistemic theory he calls phenomenal conservatism , which he claims to accord with common sense by way of internalist intuition. In twentieth century philosophy the concept of the sensus communis as discussed by Vico and especially Kant became a major topic of philosophical discussion.
The theme of this discussion questions how far the understanding of eloquent rhetorical discussion in the case of Vico , or communally sensitive aesthetic tastes in the case of Kant can give a standard or model for political, ethical and legal discussion in a world where forms of relativism are commonly accepted, and serious dialogue between very different nations is essential. Hannah Arendt adapted Kant's concept of sensus communis as a faculty of aesthetic judgement that imagines the judgements of others, into something relevant for political judgement.
Thus she created a "Kantian" political philosophy, which, as she said herself, Kant did not write. She argued that there was often a banality to evil in the real world, for example in the case of someone like Adolf Eichmann , which consisted in a lack of sensus communis and thoughtfulness generally.
Lyotard also saw Kant's sensus communis as an important concept for understanding political judgement, not aiming at any consensus, but rather at a possibility of a " euphony " in "dis-sensus". Lyotard claimed that any attempt to impose any sensus communis in real politics would mean imposture by an empowered faction upon others. In a parallel development, Antonio Gramsci , Benedetto Croce, and later Hans-Georg Gadamer took inspiration from Vico's understanding of common sense as a kind of wisdom of nations, going beyond Cartesian method.
It has been suggested that Gadamer's most well-known work, Truth and Method , can be read as an "extended meditation on the implications of Vico's defense of the rhetorical tradition in response to the nascent methodologism that ultimately dominated academic enquiry". Gadamer came into direct debate with his contemporary Habermas, the so-called Hermeneutikstreit. Habermas, with a self-declared Enlightenment "prejudice against prejudice" argued that if breaking free from the restraints of language is not the aim of dialectic, then social science will be dominated by whoever wins debates, and thus Gadamer's defense of sensus communis effectively defends traditional prejudices.
Gadamer argued that being critical requires being critical of prejudices including the prejudice against prejudice. Some prejudices will be true.
In other projects Wikisource. Shaftesbury's seminal essay Sensus Communis: Gadamer came into direct debate with his contemporary Habermas, the so-called Hermeneutikstreit. Hutcheson described it as, "a Publick Sense, viz. He made this a basis for a new and better-founded approach to discuss Natural Law , improving upon Grotius, John Selden , and Pufendorf who he felt had failed to convince, because they could claim no authority from nature.
And Gadamer did not share Habermas' acceptance that aiming at going beyond language through method was not itself potentially dangerous. Furthermore, he insisted that because all understanding comes through language, hermeneutics has a claim to universality. As Gadamer wrote in the "Afterword" of Truth and Method , "I find it frighteningly unreal when people like Habermas ascribe to rhetoric a compulsory quality that one must reject in favor of unconstrained, rational dialogue".
Paul Ricoeur argued that Gadamer and Habermas were both right in part. As a hermeneutist like Gadamer he agreed with him about the problem of lack of any perspective outside of history, pointing out that Habermas himself argued as someone coming from a particular tradition. He also agreed with Gadamer that hermeneutics is a "basic kind of knowing on which others rest. A recent commentator on Vico, John D.
Schaeffer has argued that Gadamer's approach to sensus communis exposed itself to the criticism of Habermas because it "privatized" it, removing it from a changing and oral community, following the Greek philosophers in rejecting true communal rhetoric, in favour of forcing the concept within a Socratic dialectic aimed at truth. Schaeffer claims that Vico's concept provides a third option to those of Habermas and Gadamer and he compares it to the recent philosophers Richard J.
The other Enlightenment debate about common sense, concerning common sense as a term for an emotion or drive that is unselfish, also continues to be important in discussion of social science, and especially economics. The axiom that communities can be usefully modeled as a collection of self-interested individuals is a central assumption in much of modern mathematical economics , and mathematical economics has now come to be an influential tool of political decision making.
While the term "common sense" had already become less commonly used as a term for the empathetic moral sentiments by the time of Adam Smith, debates continue about methodological individualism as something supposedly justified philosophically for methodological reasons as argued for example by Milton Friedman and more recently by Gary S. Becker , both members of the so-called Chicago school of economics.
Economics and social science generally have been criticized as a refuge of Cartesian methodology. Hence, amongst critics of the methodological argument for assuming self-centeredness in economics are authors such as Deirdre McCloskey , who have taken their bearings from the above-mentioned philosophical debates involving Habermas, Gadamer, the anti-Cartesian Richard Rorty and others, arguing that trying to force economics to follow artificial methodological laws is bad, and it is better to recognize social science as driven by rhetoric.
Other catholic theologians took up this approach, and attempts were made to combine this with more traditional Thomism, for example Jean-Marie de Lamennais. This however meant basing knowledge upon something uncertain, and irrational. This, according to Gilson, is going beyond the original meaning. Concerning Liberatore he wrote:.
Endeavours of this sort always end in defeat. In order to confer a technical philosophical value upon the common sense of orators and moralists it is necessary either to accept Reid's common sense as a sort of unjustified and unjustifiable instinct, which will destroy Thomism, or to reduce it to the Thomist intellect and reason, which will result in its being suppressed as a specifically distinct faculty of knowledge. In short, there can be no middle ground between Reid and St.
Gilson argued that Thomism avoided the problem of having to decide between Cartesian innate certainties and Reid's uncertain common sense, and that "as soon as the problem of the existence of the external world was presented in terms of common sense, Cartesianism was accepted".
And in this it is not likely that all are mistaken: For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellencies, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.
Some say the Senses receive the Species of things, and deliver them to the Common-sense; and the Common Sense delivers them over to the Fancy, and the Fancy to the Memory, and the Memory to the Judgement, like handing of things from one to another, with many words making nothing understood.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Not to be confused with Common knowledge. For other uses, see Common sense disambiguation. These five would be accompanied by two members of the assembly of colonies, for a total of seven representatives from each colony in the Continental Conference. The Continental Conference would then meet and draft a Continental Charter that would secure "freedom and property to all men, and… the free exercise of religion". Paine suggested that a congress may be created in the following way: The Congress would meet annually, and elect a president.
Each colony would be put into a lottery; the president would be elected, by the whole congress, from the delegation of the colony that was selected in the lottery. After a colony was selected, it would be removed from subsequent lotteries until all of the colonies had been selected, at which point the lottery would start anew. Electing a president or passing a law would require three-fifths of the congress. The fourth section of the pamphlet includes Paine's optimistic view of America's military potential at the time of the revolution.
For example, he spends pages describing how colonial shipyards, by using the large amounts of lumber available in the country, could quickly create a navy that could rival the Royal Navy. Due to heavy advertisement by both Bell and Paine, and the immense publicity created by their publishing quarrel, Common Sense was an immediate sensation not only in Philadelphia but also across the Thirteen Colonies.
Early "reviewers" mainly letter excerpts published anonymously in colonial newspapers touted the clear and rational case for independence put forth by Paine.
His stile [ sic ] is plain and nervous; his facts are true; his reasoning, just and conclusive". This mass appeal, one later reviewer noted, was due to Paine's dramatic calls for popular support of revolution, "giv[ing] liberty to every individual to contribute materials for that great building, the grand charter of American Liberty". In the months leading up to the Declaration of Independence , many more reviewers noted that these two main themes—direct and passionate style and calls for individual empowerment—were decisive in swaying the Colonists from reconciliation to rebellion.
The pamphlet was also highly successful because of a brilliant marketing tactic planned by Paine. He and Bell timed the first edition to be published at around the same time as a proclamation on the colonies by King George III , hoping to contrast the strong, monarchical message with the heavily anti-monarchical Common Sense. While Paine focused his style and address towards the common people, the arguments he made touched on prescient debates of morals, government, and the mechanisms of democracy. Paine's formulation of "war for an idea" led to, as Eric Foner describes it, "a torrent of letters, pamphlets, and broadsides on independence and the meaning of republican government John Adams , who would succeed George Washington to become the new nation's second president, in his Thoughts on Government wrote that Paine's ideal sketched in Common Sense was "so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work".
Writing as "The Forester", he responded to Cato and other critics in the pages of Philadelphian papers with passion, declaring again in sweeping language that their conflict was not only with Great Britain, but with the tyranny inevitably resulting from monarchical rule. Later scholars have assessed Common Sense's influence in several ways. Owen Aldridge, emphasize that Common Sense could hardly be said to embody a particular ideology, and that "even Paine himself may not have been cognizant of the ultimate source of many of his concepts", making the point that much of the pamphlet's value came as a result of the context in which it was published.
Each of these arguments is in some way true, and together they portray Common Sense as an impressive piece of propaganda advocating a distinct and timely action and set of principles. Coupling this with the immense publicity and readership created by both the publishing dispute and the newspaper debates establishes Common Sense as an important stepping stone towards independence. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the concept, see Common sense.
For other uses, see Common Sense disambiguation. Penguin, , p.
Common Sense Media improves the lives of kids and families by providing independent reviews, age ratings, & other information about all types of media. Common sense is sound practical judgment concerning everyday matters, or a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge that is shared by ("common to").
Wilson and William F. Hall, , pp. Viking, , pp. Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, A History , New York: