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What Descartes Taught Us About Common Sense
The origin of modern rational thinking and decision-science.
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 René Descartes is the source of the most common ways of understanding “common sense” as a widely spread type of judgment.
Descartes description of common sense has two related meanings:
1. The basic and widely shared ability to judge true and false, which he also calls raison (reason);
2. Wisdom, the perfected version of the first.
His idea is fundamentally that common good sense (and indeed sense perception) is not reliable enough for the new Cartesian method of skeptical reasoning. This concept of “Skepticism*” can be defined as any questioning attitude towards unobserved knowledge or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere. The Cartesian project sought to replace common good sense with clearly defined mathematical reasoning and was aimed at certainty, and not a mere…
