Review of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy by Christoph Schuringa (Verso Books, 2025)
In his famous 1925 essay “A Defence of Common Sense,” the philosopher G. E. Moore wrote: “There exists at present a living human body, which is my body.” For Moore, such an utterance is an example of a “truism” that might seem so obvious that it is not worth stating. And yet state it he does.
Moore’s point is that there are propositions about the world that are completely certain, that cannot be refuted, and they are not simply dependent on the activity of the mind. These propositions make up what we might call “common sense.”
The term “common sense” has been central to analytic philosophy’s hegemony in academic philosophy circles. It is a term that is sufficiently obvious, but also usefully vague, that it can be wielded to dismiss any countervailing idea without having to engage in any kind of argument.
No idea worth its salt could be outside the realm of common sense. When the Oxford philosophy don A. J. Ayer decided to take aim at Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, for example, he was able to dismiss Sartre’s ideas in these terms: “This is a typically Existentialist piece of reasoning and one that I find very difficult to follow.” And nothing commonsensical could be “difficult to follow.”
In Common Sense: A Political History, Sophia Rosenfeld notes that trust in common sense “has, in the context of contemporary democratic politics, itself become commonsensical.” Politicians…
Auteur: Neil Vallelly
