How reason found its common sense in Latin Aristotelianism: Commentary practice and the problem of universality in latin aristotelianism

Abstract

Argument A history of “common sense” concerns as much the epistemological concept as the very architecture of human rational judgment. The historian of medieval philosophy Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) cast nineteenth-century Jesuit appeals to common sense as a costly defense against the Cartesian problem of certainty: when intellectual first principles are fused with sensus communis , metaphysical realism is at risk. The first aim of this paper is to revise Gilson’s historiography by showing that fusions of sense and reason began much earlier, already within the Latin tradition from the thirteenth century onward. I show that in their commentary practices , historical actors from Albert the Great (1200–1280) to Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) increasingly aligned conceptiones communes, assensus , consensus , and sensus communis , to the point that sensus communis could serve as a topos in philosophical argument. The second aim of the paper is to revisit Gilson’s concern about metaphysical realism. Here, I argue that common sense is essential in philosophical practice, but cannot supplant the first principles of reason. For when common sense becomes the sole foundation of human reasoning, reason loses the answerability to truth that it obtains from its contact with reality.