21 Facts About Common sense

Everyday understanding of common sense derives from historical philosophical discussion involving several European languages.

Thomas Paine's polemical pamphlet Common Sense has been described as the most influential political pamphlet of the 18th century, affecting both the American and French revolutions.

Each Common sense is used to identify distinctions, such as sight identifying the difference between black and white, but, says Aristotle, all animals with perception must have "some one thing" that can distinguish black from sweet.

The common sense is where this comparison happens, and this must occur by comparing impressions of what the specialist senses have perceived.

The common sense is therefore where a type of consciousness originates, "for it makes us aware of having sensations at all.

Related searches

Under this medieval scheme the common sense was understood to be seated not in the heart, as Aristotle had thought, but in the anterior Galenic ventricle of the brain.

Common sense described this inner faculty when writing in Latin in his Meditations on first philosophy.

The common sense is the link between the body and its senses, and the true human mind, which according to Descartes must be purely immaterial.

Descartes' judgement of this common sense was that it was enough to persuade the human consciousness of the existence of physical things, but often in a very indistinct way.

Idea that now became influential, developed in both the Latin and French works of Descartes, though coming from different directions, is that common good sense is not reliable enough for the new Cartesian method of skeptical reasoning.

Common sense influenced Locke and Pierre Bayle, in their critique of metaphysics, and in 1733 Voltaire "introduced him as the "father" of the scientific method" to a French audience, an understanding that was widespread by 1750.

Common sense drew upon authors such as Seneca, Juvenal, Horace and Marcus Aurelius, for whom, he saw, common sense was not just a reference to widely held vulgar opinions, but something cultivated among educated people living in better communities.

Vico, who taught classical rhetoric in Naples under a Cartesian-influenced Spanish government, was not widely read until the 20th century, but his writings on common sense have been an important influence upon Hans-Georg Gadamer, Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci.

Common sense 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.

Common sense thus developed a detailed view of an evolving wisdom of peoples.

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:.

Common sense 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 demands for absolute knowledge.

Common sense was 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.

Common sense's 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 and thoughtfulness generally.

Common sense agreed with Gadamer that hermeneutics is a "basic kind of knowing on which others rest".

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.