# Common sense

**Common sense** is a term with two distinct historical meanings. In its older, technical sense it names a faculty of perception, the Greek *koinē aisthēsis* rendered in Latin as *sensus communis*, which [Aristotle](https://www.edgepedia.org/aristotle) introduced to explain perceptual operations that the five individual senses cannot perform on their own, such as perceiving that the same object is white and sweet or noticing that white and sweet differ. In its everyday sense, common sense refers to knowledge, judgment, and taste held more or less universally and without reflection or argument, a meaning that emerged from Stoic and rhetorical traditions and that the modern phrase usually carries.<sup>[1](https://academic.oup.com/book/12823)</sup>

| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Technical term | *Koinē aisthēsis* (Greek), *sensus communis* (Latin); a higher-order perceptual capacity that unites and monitors the five senses<sup>[1](https://academic.oup.com/book/12823)</sup> |
| Aristotle's uses | The phrase appears explicitly in *De Anima* III.1 425a27, *De Memoria et Reminiscentia* 1 450a10, and *De Partibus Animalium* IV.10 686a31; scholarship is divided on three further passages (*De Anima* III.7 431b5, *Historia Animalium* I.3 489a17, *Metaphysics* 981b14)<sup>[2](https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2026.2620308)</sup> |
| Functions (Ross) | Perception of common sensibles, of incidental sensibles, awareness that we are perceiving, discrimination between objects of different senses, and the inference about sleep and sensory inactivity<sup>[2](https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2026.2620308)</sup> |
| Functions (Gregoric) | Four: simultaneous perception, perceptual discrimination, control of the senses, monitoring of the senses<sup>[3](https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/aristotle-on-the-common-sense/)</sup> |
| Common sensibles | Motion, rest, shape, magnitude, number, and unity, graspable by more than one sense and not tied to a special sense organ<sup>[4](https://library.nlu.edu.ua/POLN_TEXT/SENMK/Ancient%20Philosophy.pdf)</sup> |
| First ancient theory | Not the Stoic doctrine of common conceptions, per Charles Brittain, but its transformation in Cicero's later rhetorical works<sup>[5](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/language-and-learning/common-sense-concepts-definition-and-meaning-in-and-out-of-the-stoa/C781C7D269CD22CFEAE0EE1B205851FD)</sup> |
| Modern definition (Vico) | "Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race"<sup>[6](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15362426.2011.559395)</sup> |

## Aristotle's common sense

Apart from seeing with the eyes and hearing with the ears, human beings and other animals regularly perform perceptual operations that cannot be explained by the five senses taken individually. Aristotle, unwilling to ascribe any share in rationality to animals that clearly perform these operations, explained them through a higher-order perceptual capacity that unites and monitors the senses. This is the capacity later writers called the common sense.<sup>[1](https://academic.oup.com/book/12823)</sup>

The evidence is thin. Aristotle mentions the capacity in only a handful of passages, and these references are scattered and opaque, which is why the exact nature and functions of the common sense have been, in the words of Pavel Gregoric, a philosopher at the [University of Zagreb](https://www.edgepedia.org/university-of-zagreb) whose 2007 Oxford monograph is the standard treatment, a matter of perennial controversy.<sup>[1](https://academic.oup.com/book/12823)</sup> Traditionally scholars counted three indisputable occurrences, at *De Anima* III.1 425a27, *De Memoria et Reminiscentia* 1 450a10, and *De Partibus Animalium* IV.10 686a31, and Gregoric argues for five in total.<sup>[3](https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/aristotle-on-the-common-sense/)</sup>

The core problem the capacity solves is that of unified perception. When we encounter a horse we may see, hear, feel, and smell it, and it is the common sense that unifies these as perceptions of a single object, though the knowledge that the object is a horse belongs, for Aristotle, to intellect rather than sense.<sup>[4](https://library.nlu.edu.ua/POLN_TEXT/SENMK/Ancient%20Philosophy.pdf)</sup> Aristotle also needed a way to account for the common sensibles, qualities such as motion and shape that no single sense owns: we can tell that something is moving either by watching it or by feeling it, so no special sense detects motion, yet Aristotle held that a faculty perceives it.<sup>[4](https://library.nlu.edu.ua/POLN_TEXT/SENMK/Ancient%20Philosophy.pdf)</sup>

Interpretation remains contested. In the canonical typification of the scholar David Ross, the common sense performs five functions, from perceiving common and incidental sensibles to the awareness that we are perceiving.<sup>[2](https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2026.2620308)</sup> Gregoric narrows the list to four: simultaneous perception, perceptual discrimination, control of the senses, and monitoring of the senses.<sup>[3](https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/aristotle-on-the-common-sense/)</sup> On his reading, some passages often read as naming the common sense do not: at *De Anima* III.1 425a27 the phrase *aisthēsis koinē* describes an aspect of properly functioning individual senses, their sensitivity to the common perceptibles, rather than a higher-order capacity.<sup>[7](https://academic.oup.com/book/12823/chapter-abstract/163062467)</sup> Reviewers have noted the tension here; Deborah Modrak of the [University of Rochester](https://www.edgepedia.org/university-of-rochester) observes that restricting the notion to higher-order perceptual functions, as Gregoric recommends, is itself controversial, and the alternative reading takes the sensory capacity of the soul, containing both perception and imagination, as the central sense faculty.<sup>[8](https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2008/2008.02.20/)</sup>

## Attitudes in ancient Greek philosophy

Philosophy in Greece treated common sense, in the everyday sense of what people in general routinely think, with two contrasting attitudes. One strand is dismissive: popular opinion is misguided and out of touch with the way things really are. The other regards human beings as having cognitive capacities that can yield correct insights if allowed to operate properly. Both strands appear throughout Greek philosophy, sometimes in the same thinker; among those surveyed by Richard Bett, Aristotle is the most sympathetic to common sense and the Presocratics perhaps the most dismissive, with Plato, the Stoics, Epicureans, and the skeptic [Sextus Empiricus](https://www.edgepedia.org/sextus-empiricus) in between.<sup>[9](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-commonsense-philosophy/attitudes-towards-common-sense-in-ancient-greek-philosophy/819925DBDF003AAA372B339309B8FE1E)</sup> Plato did much to distance philosophers from the common people, contrasting true knowledge (*epistēmē*) with the opinion (*doxa*) of the many.<sup>[10](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/common-sense-and-science-from-aristotle-to-reid/common-sense-and-scientific-thinking-before-copernicus/294CF2B36B5F6F9451441869B1890656)</sup>

A parallel line of development produced the epistemological, non-perceptual notion. Appeals to universal agreement appear in ancient thought from the fourth century BCE at least implicitly, but a developed theory of common sense became possible only when the Stoics elaborated the Socratic insight that rationality is in some sense constitutive of all adult human beings. The Stoics held that certain conceptions, the *koinai ennoiai* or common conceptions, arise naturally in every human mind from repeated sense experience and are therefore taken to be true, serving as the basis for arguments across all three parts of Stoic philosophy.<sup>[5](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/language-and-learning/common-sense-concepts-definition-and-meaning-in-and-out-of-the-stoa/C781C7D269CD22CFEAE0EE1B205851FD)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[11](https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/stoicism/v-1/sections/criteria-of-truth)</sup> On Charles Brittain's account, the earliest theory of common sense in the ancient world was not even this Stoic doctrine but its transformation in Cicero's later rhetorical works, part of a development running from [Carneades](https://www.edgepedia.org/carneades) in the second century BCE to [Simplicius](https://www.edgepedia.org/simplicius) in the sixth century CE.<sup>[5](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/language-and-learning/common-sense-concepts-definition-and-meaning-in-and-out-of-the-stoa/C781C7D269CD22CFEAE0EE1B205851FD)</sup>

## The Latin tradition and early modern meanings

In Latin Aristotelianism the perceptual *sensus communis* and the rationalist appeals to *conceptiones communes* and *consensus* gradually converged. From Albert the Great (1200 to 1280) to [Francisco Suárez](https://www.edgepedia.org/francisco-suarez) (1548 to 1617), commentary practice aligned these notions to the point that *sensus communis* could serve as a topos of philosophical argument; the historian [Étienne Gilson](https://www.edgepedia.org/etienne-gilson) (1884 to 1978) later cast the Jesuit use of common sense as a defense against the Cartesian problem of certainty, though the fusion of sense and reason began much earlier.<sup>[12](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42872374/)</sup> The Aristotelian conception became part and parcel of Western psychological theories from antiquity through the Middle Ages and well into the early modern period.<sup>[1](https://academic.oup.com/book/12823)</sup>

**The vernacular meaning crystallized** in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The third Earl of Shaftesbury, in his work *Sensus Communis*, drew on classical scholars' interpretations of [Marcus Aurelius](https://www.edgepedia.org/marcus-aurelius)' Stoic term *koinonoēmosynē* and deliberately shifted the emphasis to bind common sense to public spirit, constructing his account within a Stoic framework.<sup>[13](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sbp/46/0/46_2023_017/_article/-char/ja/)</sup> [Giambattista Vico](https://www.edgepedia.org/giambattista-vico) gave the sense that now dominates ordinary usage its most explicit early definition, that common sense is judgment without reflection shared by an entire class, people, nation, or the entire human race, and he emphasized that shared human practices such as religion, marriage, and funerals constitute it more than mere sense does.<sup>[6](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15362426.2011.559395)</sup>

The same period produced a self-conscious philosophical school built on the concept. Scottish common sense philosophy arose in the middle third of the eighteenth century as part of the [Scottish Enlightenment](https://www.edgepedia.org/scottish-enlightenment), treating the common judgments of humankind as having epistemic weight simply in virtue of being common.<sup>[14](https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/ds/article/view/15898)</sup> This commodity was later derided by [Immanuel Kant](https://www.edgepedia.org/immanuel-kant) as the conceit by which, in his phrase, the stalest windbag can confidently take up with the soundest thinker, which is why treatments of the Aristotelian faculty stress that it is a different notion altogether.<sup>[3](https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/aristotle-on-the-common-sense/)</sup>

## Later echoes

The Aristotelian faculty has remained a live category. [Hannah Arendt](https://www.edgepedia.org/hannah-arendt)'s account of *sensus communis* reaches back through Thomism to the Aristotelian tradition, where the unity of a common faculty of sense perception grounds the possibility of true or false judgment.<sup>[15](https://revistas.uece.br/index.php/kalagatos/article/download/16955/14166/74657)</sup> In contemporary perception research, the assumption of separate senses that Gibson rejected has itself been traced back to classical antiquity, and some theorists argue instead that the senses function as a single perceptual system, a position with obvious structural affinities to Aristotle's unified faculty.<sup>[16](https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18502)</sup> The Greek phrase itself, *koinē aisthēsis*, can still mislead: in *Historia Animalium* Aristotle's remark that touch is the one sense common to all animals uses *koinē* in an ordinary way, and reading it as a reference to the common sense would be like saying that because the senses are common to all animals, all animals have common sense.<sup>[3](https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/aristotle-on-the-common-sense/)</sup>

## References

1. [Pavel Gregoric, *Aristotle on the Common Sense*, Oxford University Press, 2007](https://academic.oup.com/book/12823)
2. [The Common Is the Collective, Angelaki](https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2026.2620308)
3. [Christopher Shields, review of *Aristotle on the Common Sense*, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2009](https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/aristotle-on-the-common-sense/)
4. [Ancient Philosophy (Ierodiakonou et al.), Routledge](https://library.nlu.edu.ua/POLN_TEXT/SENMK/Ancient%20Philosophy.pdf)
5. [Charles Brittain, "Common sense: concepts, definition and meaning in and out of the Stoa," in *Language and Learning*, Cambridge University Press, 2005](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/language-and-learning/common-sense-concepts-definition-and-meaning-in-and-out-of-the-stoa/C781C7D269CD22CFEAE0EE1B205851FD)
6. [Stoic Rhetoric: Prospects of a Problematic, *Advances in the History of Rhetoric*](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15362426.2011.559395)
7. [Pavel Gregoric, "De Anima III.1 425a27," in *Aristotle on the Common Sense*](https://academic.oup.com/book/12823/chapter-abstract/163062467)
8. [Deborah K. W. Modrak, review of *Aristotle on the Common Sense*, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2008.02.20](https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2008/2008.02.20/)
9. [Richard Bett, "Attitudes towards Common Sense in Ancient Greek Philosophy," in *The Cambridge Companion to Common-Sense Philosophy*, 2020](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-commonsense-philosophy/attitudes-towards-common-sense-in-ancient-greek-philosophy/819925DBDF003AAA372B339309B8FE1E)
10. [Common Sense and Scientific Thinking before Copernicus, in *Common Sense and Science from Aristotle to Reid*, Cambridge University Press, 2020](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/common-sense-and-science-from-aristotle-to-reid/common-sense-and-scientific-thinking-before-copernicus/294CF2B36B5F6F9451441869B1890656)
11. [Stoicism, criteria of truth, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy](https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/stoicism/v-1/sections/criteria-of-truth)
12. [How reason found its common sense in Latin Aristotelianism, PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42872374/)
13. [Shaftesbury's reception of sensus communis, *British Journal for the History of Philosophy* (J-STAGE), 2023](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sbp/46/0/46_2023_017/_article/-char/ja/)
14. [Scottish Common Sense Philosophy: Twelve Theses, *Diciottesimo Secolo*](https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/ds/article/view/15898)
15. [Reflections on post-truth and its relationship to the crisis of common sense, *Kalagatos*](https://revistas.uece.br/index.php/kalagatos/article/download/16955/14166/74657)
16. [The Senses Considered as One Perceptual System, arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18502)

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