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The Late Great History of Common Sense
From the ancient Greeks through the present.
One of the greatest expressions of self-love is common sense. It is through the act of wise self-love, that we seek to be more efficient, effective, precise, productive, and more self-aware.
Today, there seems to be less common sense around than ever before. You’ve heard of the “Dark Ages?” We may look back in a few decades and call these times we are living in the “Darker Ages”.
As basic as the idea may seem, “common sense” is less common than ever before.
The term common sense actually has at least two specifically philosophical meanings. Aristotle spoke of the capability of the animal soul (Greek psukhē) — which includes humans — to use different individual senses to process sense-perceptions, memories, and imagination in order to collectively perceive the characteristics of physical things such as movement and size, which all physical things have in different combinations. This would allow humans and other animals to distinguish and identify physical things in order to reach many types of basic judgments. In Aristotle’s scheme, only humans have real reasoned thinking (noein), which takes them beyond…
