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Common sense is a term with philosophical origins, which is today commonly used to refer to a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge things which is shared by ("common to") nearly all people, and can be reasonably expected of nearly all people without any need for debate. The term is influenced by other languages, and related words in other languages include Latin sensus communis, Greek κοινὴ αἲσθησις, (koinè aísthēsis), and French bons sens but these are not straightforward translations in all contexts.

"Common sense" also has at least two more specialised shades of meaning that are historically very important and still widely discussed today. One is a capability of the animal soul (Greek psukhē) proposed by Aristotle, which enables different individual senses to collectively perceive the distinguishing characteristics which are common to all things, such as movement. The second special use of the term is Roman-influenced and is used for the natural human sensation of public or communal sensitivity. Just like the everyday meaning, both of these refer to a type of basic perception which most people are expected to have naturally, even if they can not explain it. The inter-connected history of the different meanings of this term has been part of the complex history of many important changing political ideas in modern Western Civilisation.

In modern times, starting with Descartes, the meaning of common sense has often tended to be more vague and sometimes even pejorative. In the opening line of one his most famous books, Discourse on Method, he argues that everyone has a similar and sufficient amount of common sense, but it is does not get used correctly. Therefore a logical method described by Descartes needs to be followed and common sense should not be overly relied upon. But this critique of Descartes was not only influential but also controversial in some aspects, and the concept of common sense, and how it should best be used, remains linked to many of the most perennial topics in epistemology and ethics.

Aristotelian common sense

The origin of the term is in a difficult-to-interpret passage in Aristotle's De Anima Book III, chapter 2, especially at line 425a27. (There are other places in the works of Aristotle uses the same two words together: De Anima III.7 431b, De memoria et reminiscentia 1450a, De Partibus Animalium IV.10 686a, Metaphysics I.1 981b, Historia Animalium I.3 489a.) The passage is about how the human mind converts raw sense perceptions from the five specialized sense perceptions, into perceptions of real things moving and changing. Each of the five senses perceives one type of "perceptible" or "sensible" which is specific (Greek: idia) to it. For example sight can see colour. But Aristotle seeks to explain how the animal mind can link and categorize different tastes, colours, feelings, smells and sounds in order to perceive real things which everyone actually perceives in terms of the "common sensibles" (or "common perceptibles"). Common (koinos) is in this discussion a term opposed to specific or particular (idia). The Greek for these common sensibles is ta koina, which means shared or common things, and Aristotle lists change, shape, magnitude, number and unity, but he notes that we perceive shape, magnitude, and rest by first being able to perceive change or movement (Greek: kinēsis), and number is perceived by perceiving a lack of unity. Distinct combinations of these properties are common to all perceived things. (These "common sensibles" or koina are in other words a Platonic-Aristotelian version of what are today called "universals".)

In this passage, Aristotle says that concerning the koina (such as movement) we already have a sense, a "common sense" (Greek: koinè aisthēsis), which does not work by accident (Greek: kata sumbebēkos). And there is no specific (idia) sense perception for movement and other koina, because then we would not perceive the koina at all, except by accident. Aristotle gives examples of perceiving by accident: using the specific sense perception vision on its own to see that something is sweet, or to recognize a friend by their distinctive colour. In such cases sight alone is not really perceiving a taste or a person, except by accident. In fact he says, we recognize real things and movements when certain sensations occur together or not in a certain way. So the normal five individual senses do sense the common perceptibles according to Aristotle (and Plato), but simply do not grasp them as such on their own. Aristotle proposes that the reason for having several senses is that in fact that it increases the chances that we can distinguish and recognize things correctly. Each 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" which can distinguish black from sweet. The common sense is where this comparison happens, and this must occur by comparing impressions (or symbols or markers; Greek: sēmeion) of what the specialist senses have perceived. This is therefore also where a type of consciousness originates, "for it makes us aware of having sensations at all". And it receives physical picture imprints from the imaginative faculty, which are then memories that can be recollected.

The whole discussion builds upon the account of Aristotle's teacher Plato in his Socratic dialogue, the Theaetetus. But Plato's dialogue presented an argument that recognizing koina is an active thinking process which happens in the rational part of the human soul, making the senses instruments of the thinking part of man. Plato's Socrates says this kind of thinking is not a kind of sense at all. Aristotle, trying to give a more general account of the souls of all animals, not just humans, moves the act of perception out of the rational thinking soul into this sensus communis, which is something like a sense, and something like thinking, but not rational.

The passage is difficult to interpret because Aristotle specifically states that there is no sixth sense, meaning that in agreement with Plato "common sense" is not another sense like the "specific senses". And as Gregorić has pointed out, in other passages in his works Aristotle seems to imply that the five normal senses are themselves "common senses", with touch being the "most common", implying that a common sense would be any sense very widely shared amongst all animals - but this may just be a confusing use of the same word with a different meaning. Furthermore, Aristotle never fully spells out the relationship between the common sense and the imaginative faculty which he also proposes, although the two clearly work together in all animals, and may even be the same.

While scholars have varying interpretations of this discussion by Aristotle, his "common sense" was in any case not rational, in the sense that it implied no ability to explain the perception. Reason or rationality (Greek: logos) does not exist in the lower animals, only in man, and yet animals can perceive "common perceptibles" such as change and shape.

This philosophical meaning of common sense has continued to be influential and was further developed into the Middle Ages. "In different ways the philosophers of medieval Latin and Arabic tradition, from Al-Farabi to Avicenna, Averroës, Albert, and Thomas, found in the De Anima and the Parva Naturalia the scattered elements of a coherent doctrine of the "central" faculty of the sensuous soul." In Europe Thomas Aquinas, was particularly notable in his influence. Like his predecessor Albert, and like Descartes after him, he equated common sense with the soul's power of imagination or fantasy. But this was derived from the earlier Persian author Avicenna, whose works were widely translated and studied in Medieval Europe.

Cartesian common sense

One of the last notable authors to accept something like the Aristotelian "common sense" was Descartes, but he also under-mined it. He described this inner faculty when writing in Latin in his Meditations on first philosophy. Unlike Aristotle, who had placed it in the heart, by the time of Descartes this faculty was thought to be in the brain, and he located it in the newly discovered pituitary gland. 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. To get a more distinct understanding of things, it is more important to be methodical and mathematical. This line of thought was taken further, if not by Descartes himself then by those he influenced, until the concept of a faculty or organ of common sense was itself rejected.

René Descartes is generally credited with making obsolete the notion that there was an actual faculty within the human brain that functioned as a sensus communis. The French philosopher did not fully reject the idea of the inner senses, which he appropriated from the Scholastics. But he distanced himself from the Aristotelian conception of a common sense faculty, abandoning it entirely by the time of his Passions of the Soul (1649).

On the other hand Descartes used two different terms in his work, not only the Latin term "sensus communis", but also the French term "bon sens", with which he opens his Discourse on Method. This work was written in French, and does not directly discuss the Aristotelian technical theory of perception. Bon sens is the equivalent of modern English "common sense" or "good sense". As the Aristotelian meaning of the Latin term began to be forgotten after Descartes, his discussion of bon sens gave a new way of defining "sensus communis" in various European languages including Latin.

The idea which now became influential, developed in both the Latin and French works of Descartes, though coming from different directions, is that common good sense (and indeed the five senses) are only a starting point for the new Cartesian method of skeptical reasoning. The Cartesian project to replace common good sense with clearly defined reasoning, aimed at certainty, and not mere probability, was promoted further by people such as Hobbes, Spinoza, and others has had (and continues to have) important impacts on everyday life. In France, Spain and Italy it was associated with Catholic empires seeking to centralize their power and respond to Machiavellianism and Protestantism.

Cartesian theory offered a justification for innovative social change achieved through the courts and administration, an ability to adapt the law to changing social conditions by making the basis for legislation "rational" rather than "traditional".

So after Descartes, critical attention turned from Aristotle to Descartes' own more negative treatment of "sensus communis" as common good sense, concerning which several authors found help in Roman literature.

Roman common sense

Amongst Roman authors, the term "sensus communis" had meanings which were apparently influenced by several Greek terms all including the word koinē (meaning shared or common) including not only koinē aisthēsis but also such terms as koinē nous and koinē ennoia. One specific area in which these terms had been used was rhetoric, a subject that Aristotle was the first to systematize. In his Rhetoric for example he used the term "koinōn ... tàs písteis" or "common beliefs", saying that "our proofs and arguments must rest on generally accepted principles, when speaking of converse with the multitude".

In a similar passage in his own work on rhetoric, De Oratore, Cicero wrote that "in oratory the very cardinal sin is to depart from the language of everyday life and the usage approved by the sense of the community". The sense of the community is in this case one translation of "communis sensus" in the Latin of Cicero. Quintilian, Lucretius, Seneca and some of the most influential Roman authors influenced by Aristotle's rhetoric and philosophy used the Latin term "sensus communis" in similar ways.

The usage of the term was now however somewhat different from the old Greek technical term. Whether the Latin writers such as Cicero deliberately used this Aristotelian term in a new more peculiarly Roman way, continues to be a subject of much discussion, but in any case a complex of ideas attached itself to the term and eventually came to be present in scholarly discussion in western Europe, after Descartes. As with other meanings of common sense, "it designates a sensibility shared by all, from which one may deduce a number of fundamental judgments, that need not, or cannot, be questioned by rational reflection.". But even though Cicero did at least once use the term to translate Aristotle's theory of perception, he and other Roman authors did not normally use it as a technical term at all, as it was in Aristotle's De Anima, and as it was in medieval Scholasticism. Instead it was often used as a term equivalent to humanitas which was a term that could be used by Romans to imply not only human nature, but also humane conduct, good breeding, refined manners, and so on.

The Enlightenment after Descartes

During the Enlightenment, Descartes' criticism of "bon sens" and his insistence upon a mathematical-style method of thinking was accepted in some ways, but also criticized. Like the Scholastics before him, Descartes was seen to rely too much on metaphysics in order to justify his method. Berkeley famously wrote that enlightenment requires a "revolt from metaphysical notions to the plain dictates of nature and common sense".

In contrast to Descartes and the Cartesian "rationalists", who rejected reliance upon experience and induction, and insisted certainty was possible, the methodical use of normal experience to achieve a kind of near certainty had its "empircist" defenders, who took their orientation from Francis Bacon.

Once Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza had applied Cartesian reasoning to political philosophy, concerns about this approach increased. With this in mind, Shaftesbury and, much less known at the time, Giambattista Vico, both presented new arguments for the importance of the Roman understanding of common sense, in what is now often referred to as a humanist interpretation of the term. Their concern had several inter-related aspects. One ethical concern was the deliberately simplified method which treated human communities atomistically, and assumed each individual to be essentially selfish, ignoring the sense of community which the Romans understood as part of common sense. Another connected concern epistemological concern was that by considering common good sense as inherently inferior to Cartesian conclusions developed from simplified assumptions, a type of wisdom was being arrogantly ignored.

Shaftesbury, saw that especially in authors such as Seneca, Juvenal and Horace, common sense was not just a reference to any widely held opinions, but more specifically referring to, as Francis Hutcheson put it, "a Publick Sense, viz. “our Determination to be pleased with the Happiness of others, and to be uneasy at their Misery.”" which, he explains, "was sometimes called Ḱοινονοημοσύνη or Sensus Communis by some of the Antients".

Vico, who taught classical rhetoric in Naples under a Spanish government driven by modernist Cartesians, was not widely read until the 20th century, but his writings on common sense have drawn comment from Hans Georg Gadamer, Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci. Vico's initial use of the term, which was of much inspiration to Gadamer for example, appears in his On the Study Methods of our Time, and presents rhetoric and eloquence as a way of training people to find uncertain truth and gives a communal authority to appeal to. In its mature version, Vico's conception of sensus communis is defined by him as “judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, and entire nation, or the entire human race”. Vico proposed his own anti-Cartesian methodology for a new Baconian science, inspired, he said, by Plato, Tacitus, [Francis Bacon and Grotius. In this he went further than his predecessors concerning the ancient certainties which are 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) and he developed a detailed view of an evolving wisdom of peoples. This has been compared to much later Hegelian historicism.

By the late enlightenment period in the 18th century, the communal sense or empathy pointed to by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had become the "moral sense" or "moral sentiment" referred to by Hume and Adam Smith, the latter writing in plural of the "moral sentiments" with the key one being "sympathy". This had become a foil to Cartesian attempts, as in Hobbes, to understand all human behaviour as fundamentally selfish, and would also be a foil to the new ethics of Kant. This understanding of common sense as a moral sense or public spirit remains a subject for discussion, although the term "common sense" is no longer commonly used for it.

As mentioned above in terms of the more general epistemological implications of common sense, modern philosophy came to use the term common sense like Descartes, abandoning Aristotle's theory. While Descartes had distanced himself from it, John Locke abandoned it more openly, but maintained the idea of "common sensibles" which are perceived, but then George Berkeley abandoned both. For David Hume, who like Locke and Vico saw himself as following Bacon more than Descartes, common sense is entirely built up from shared experience and shared innate emotions, and therefore it is indeed imperfect as a basis for any attempt to know the truth or to make the best decision. But like Vico he defended the possibility of science without certainty and consistently described common sense as giving a valid answer to the challenge of extreme skepticism. Concerning such sceptics, he wrote:

But would these prejudiced reasoners reflect a moment, there are many obvious instances and arguments, sufficient to undeceive them, and make them enlarge their maxims and principles. Do they not see the vast variety of inclinations and pursuits among our species; where each man seems fully satisfied with his own course of life, and would esteem it the greatest unhappiness to be confined to that of his neighbour? Do they not feel in themselves, that what pleases at one time, displeases at another, by the change of inclination; and that it is not in their power, by their utmost efforts, to recall that taste or appetite, which formerly bestowed charms on what now appears indifferent or disagreeable? Do you come to a philosopher as to a cunning man, to learn something by magic or witchcraft, beyond what can be known by common prudence and discretion?

Inspired by Shaftesbury, but critical of Hume's own 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.

According to Gadamer, at least in French and British philosophy a moral element in appeals to common sense (or bon sens), such as found in Reid, remains normal to this day. But according to Gadamer, the civic quality implied in discussion of sensus communis in other European countries did not take root in the German philosophy of the time, despite the fact it consciously imitated much in English and French philosophy. "Sensus communis was understood as a purely theoretical judgment, parallel to moral consciousness (conscience) and taste." The concept of sensus communis "was emptied and intellectualized by the German enlightenment".

Gadamer notes one particular exception which is the Württemberg pietism inspired by the 18th century Swabian churchman, M. Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, who appealed to Shaftesbury and other Enlightenment figures in his critique of the Cartesian rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff, who were the most important German philosophers before Kant.

Kant

Immanuel Kant, like Shaftesbury and Vico, had a preference for a less vulgar meaning for the term common sense, and like Vico he took it a further step, 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, 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 (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, i.e. of a faculty of judgement, which in its reflection takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of all other men in thought; in order as it were to compare its judgement with the collective Reason of humanity, and thus to escape the illusion arising from the private conditions that could be so easily taken for objective, which would injuriously affect the judgement.

Kant saw this concept as answering "the question of why aesthetic judgments are valid: since aesthetic judgments are a perfectly normal function of the same faculties of cognition involved in ordinary cognition, they will have the same universal validity as such ordinary acts of cognition". But 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". For Kant, the sensus communis only applied to taste, and the meaning of taste was also narrowed as it was no longer understood as any kind of knowledge. Taste, for Kant, is universal only in that it results from "the free play of all our cognitive powers", and is communal only in that it "abstracts from all subjective, private conditions such as attractiveness and emotion".

Contemporary philosophy

In twentieth century philosophy the concept of the sensus communis as discussed by Vico and especially Kant became a major topic of philosophical discussion, including in Germany. The basic theme of this discussion is the question of how far that eloquent rhetorical discussion (in the case of Vico), or aesthetic tastes (in the case of Kant) can give a standard of reference for political, ethical and legal discussion in a world where forms of relativism are commonly accepted, and serious dialogue between very different nations has become essential.

Hannah Arendt adapted Kant's theory of sensus communis as a shared faculty of aesthetic judgement into something relevant for political judgement, giving a Kantian political philosophy which, as she said, Kant himself did not write. Arendt was criticised by Jean-François Lyotard for her use of Kant, who however also saw Kant's sensus communis as an important reference point for understanding political judgement, but not as a kind of consensus, but rather as a possibility of a "euphony" in judgement without formal rules. Lyotard claimed that any attempt to use the concept of sensus communis in real politics risked encouraging imposture. Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas also considered Kant's aesthetic sensus communis as something relevant for political and ethical discussion.

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. In the case of Gadamer, the implications of this for politics became a subject of very notable debate between himself and Jürgen Habermas.

The other Enlightenment debate about common sense, concerning common sense as a term for a communal sensitivity, also became important in the twentieth century. The axiom that communities can be modeled as a collection of self-interested individuals is a central assumption in much of modern economics, and mathematical economics has now come to be an influential tool of political decision making. But as has been described above, the term "common sense" had already become less commonly used in such discussions by the time of Adam Smith.

Projects

• McCarthy's advice-taker proposal of 1958 arguably represents the first scheme to use logic for representing common-sense knowledge in mathematical logic and using an automated theorem prover to derive answers to questions expressed in logical form. Compare Leibniz's calculus ratiocinator and characteristica universalis.
• The Cyc project attempts to provide a basis of common-sense knowledge for artificial-intelligence systems.
• The Open Mind Common Sense project resembles the Cyc project, except that it, like other on-line collaborative projects such as Misplaced Pages, depends on the contributions of thousands of individuals across the World Wide Web .

See also

References

1. The term is defined by Merriam-Webster as, "sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts." , Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary. Thus, "common sense" (in this view) equates to the judgement and perception which most people already have. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as, "the basic level of practical knowledge and judgment that we all need to help us live in a reasonable and safe way"., Cambridge Dictionaries Online.
2. See the body of this article concerning for example Descartes, Shaftesbury, and Vico and his twentieth century admirers. Thomas Paine's pamphlet named "Common Sense" was an influential publishing success during the period leading up to the American revolution.
3. Descartes (1901) Part I of the . NOTE: The term in French is "bon sens" sometimes translated as "good sense".
4. ^ Gregorić (2007)
5. De Anima 425a16, just before the famous mention of "common sense".
6. Anagnostopoulos, Georgios (ed.), A Companion to Aristotle
7. De Anima line 425a47, just after the famous mention of "common sense".
8. De Anima column 427a.
9. Sachs (2011:132) harvcoltxt error: no target: CITEREFSachs2011 (help)
10. ^ Brann (1991:43)
11. Approximately 185a-187a.
12. Thomas Aquinas: Commentary on De Anima, Book II, Chapter 2, Lectio Three
13. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, Pars I, Q. 78 A. 4 Ad 1
14. Gregorić (2007), page 12.
15. Heller-Roazen (2008), page 36.
16. Heller-Roazen (2008), page 42.
17. Descartes (1901) Chapter: MEDITATION II.: Of the Nature of the Human Mind ; and that It is More Easily Known than the Body.
18. Descartes (1901) Chapter: MEDITATION VI.: Of the Existence of Material Things , and of the Real Distinction Between the Mind and Body of Man.
19. Brann (1991:75)
20. ^ Rosenfeld (2011), page 21.
21. Rosenfeld (2011), page 282. English is unusual in keeping one term which can unite the classical and modern meanings, and philosophical and everyday meanings, so clearly. Italian has "senso comune" and also "buon senso". German has "gemeiner Verstand", "gesunder Menschenverstand", and Gemeinsinn, used by Kant and others. French also has sens commun, used by Étienne Gilson and others. Also see Wierzbicka, Anna (2010), Experience, Evidence, and Sense: The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English, Oxford University Press.
22. Heller-Roazen (2008) page 30
23. van Kessel (1987)
24. Schaeffer (1990), page 52.
25. Bugter (1987), page 84. Note: koinē ennoia is a term from Stoic philosophy, a Greek philosophy, influenced by Aristotle, and influential in Rome.
26. ἀνάγκη διὰ τῶν κοινῶν ποιεῖσθαι τὰς πίστεις καὶ τοὺς λόγους Rhetoric 1355a
27. Bugter (1987), page 90.
28. De Oratore, I, 3, 12
29. Heller-Roazen (2008), page 32.
30. Heller-Roazen (2008), page 33.
31. Bugter (1987), page 93.
32. Zhang, Longxi, The Concept of Humanity in an Age of Globalization, p. 131
33. Gadamer:19–26) harvcoltxt error: no target: CITEREFGadamer (help)
34. Although Greek, this term koinonoēmosunē is from the Meditations of the Roman emperor-philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, and was coined by him.
35. Hutcheson, Francis (2002), "section i: A general Account of our several Senses and Desires, Selfish or Publick", An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, retrieved 2013-07-25
36. A reaction to Shaftesbury in defense of the Hobbesian approach of treating communities atomistically, and driven by individual self-interest, was not long coming in Bernard Mandeville's controversial works. Indeed as is discussed in the appropriate section, this approach was never fully rejected and has become a core of modern economics.
37. Bugter (1987), page 84.
38. As remarked by several commentators such as Croce and Leo Strauss, during this period citation of Tacitus is referred to as Taciteanism, and was often a veiled way of showing the influence of Machiavelli. Citing Plato on the other hand, shows the typical rejection in this period of Aristotle and scholasticism, but not classical learning in its entirety.
39. Vico (1968), I.ii "Elements" (§§141-146) and I.iv "Method" (§§347-350).
40. Bayer (1990), "Vico's principle of sensus communis and forensic eloquence" (PDF), Chicago-Kent Law Review, 83 (3). Also see Schaeffer (1990:3) and Gadamer.
41. Jeremy Bentham gives a summary of the plethora of terms which had come to be used in British philosophy by the nineteenth century in order to describe common sense in discussions about ethics, in Chapter II, "OF PRINCIPLES ADVERSE TO THAT OF UTILITY", in "An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation": "Another man comes and alters the phrase: leaving out moral, and putting in common, in the room of it. He then tells you, that his common sense teaches him what is right and wrong, as surely as the other’s moral sense did: meaning by common sense, a sense of some kind or other, which he says, is possessed by all mankind: the sense of those, whose sense is not the same as the author’s, being struck out of the account as not worth taking."
42. Gadamer (1989:25)
43. Hume (1987) Chapter: ESSAY XVIII: THE SCEPTIC
44. Cuneo; Woudenberg, eds. (2004), The Cambridge companion to Thomas Reid, p. 85
45. Gadamer (1989:25–27)
46. Gadamer (1989:27)
47. Gadamer (1989:30)
48. Gadamer (1989:27–30)
49. Kant (1914)
50. Burnham, Douglas, Kant’s Aesthetics
51. Gadamer (1989:32–34). Note: The source makes it clear that "English" includes Scottish authors.
52. Gadamer (1989:34–41)
53. Gadamer (1989:43)
54. Benjamin, Andrew, ed. (1992), Judging Lyotard
55. See for example Albert O. Hirschman, "Against Parsimony: Three Easy Ways of Complicating Some Categories of Economic Discourse." Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 37, no. 8 (May 1984): 11-28.

Bibliography

• Aristotle, De Anima. The Loeb Classical Library edition of 1986 used the 1936 translation of W.S Hett, and the standardised Greek text of August Immanuel Bekker. One of the most distinct alternative and more recent translations is that by Joe Sachs (see below).
• Brann, Eva (1991), The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance, Rowman & Littlefield
• Bugter (1987), "Sensus Communis in the works of M. Tullius Cicero", in van Holthoon; Olson (eds.), Common Sense: The Foundations for Social Science
• Descartes, Réné (1901), The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes, translated from the Original Texts, with a new introductory Essay, Historical and Critical by John Veitch and a Special Introduction by Frank Sewall, Washington: M. Walter Dunne, retrieved 2013-07-25
• Descartes, Rene (1970), "Letter to Mersenne, 21 April 1941", in Kenny, Anthony (ed.), Descartes: Philosophical Letters, Oxford University Press Translated by Anthony Kenny. Descartes discusses his use of the notion of the common sense in the sixth meditation.
• Descartes, Rene (1989), Passions of the Soul, Hackett. Translated by Stephen H. Voss.
• Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1989), "I.1.1.B.ii "Sensus communis"", Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, New York: Continuum, pp. 19–29.
• Gregorić, Pavel (2007), Aristotle on the Common Sense, Oxford University Press
• Heller-Roazen, Daniel (2008), Nichols; Kablitz; Calhoun (eds.), Rethinking the Medieval Senses, John Hopkins University Press
• Hume, David (1987), Essays Moral, Political, Literary, edited and with a Foreword, Notes, and Glossary by Eugene F. Miller, with an appendix of variant readings from the 1889 edition by T.H. Green and T.H. Grose, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, retrieved 2013-07-25
• Kant, Immanuel (1914), "§ 40.: Of Taste as a kind of sensus communis", Kant’s Critique of Judgement, translated with Introduction and Notes by J.H. Bernard (2nd ed. revised), London: Macmillan, retrieved 2013-07-25
• van Kessel (1987), "Common Sense between Bacon and Vico: Scepticism in England and Italy", in van Holthoon; Olson (eds.), Common Sense: The Foundations for Social Science
• Oettinger, M. Friedrich Christoph. 1861. Cited in Gadamer (1989).
• Reid, Thomas (1983), "An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense", in Beanblosom; Lehrer (eds.), Thomas Reid's Inquiry and Essays, New York: Hackett
• Rosenfeld, Sophia (2011), Common Sense, Harvard University Press, ISBN 9780674061286
• Sachs, Joe (2001), Aristotle's On the Soul and On Memory and Recollection, Green Lion Press, ISBN 1-888009-17-9
• Schaeffer (1990), Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism
• Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper) (1999), "Sensus Communis, An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour in a Letter to a Friend", in Lawrence E. Klein (ed.), Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press
• Vico, Giambattista. On the Study Methods of our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
• Vico, Giambattista (1968), The New Science of Giambattista Vico (3rd ed.), Cornell University Press. Translated by Bergin and Fisch.

Further reading

• Coates, John (1996), The Claims of Common Sense: Moore, Wittgenstein, Keynes and the Social Sciences, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521412568
• Ledwig, Marion (2007), Common Sense: Its History, Method, and Applicability, Peter Lang, ISBN 9780820488844
• McCarthy, John; Lifschitz, Vladimir (1990), Formalizing Common Sense, Intellect Books, ISBN 9780893915353

• Concepts in epistemology
• Consensus reality
• Aristotle
• German philosophy
• Latin philosophical phrases
• Rhetoric
• Belief