Common Sense, Experience, and Common Conceptions in the Middle Ages

‘Common sense’, as used by Aristotle, the first to employ this phrase, describes an essential human faculty or ability through which we engage in various kinds of perceptual activity. Yet from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the commenting practices on Aristotle's works in the Latin West created alternative models and values, and shifted the scale and scope of meaning of common sense considerably. During this period, the notion of sensus communis expanded in its meaning from a faculty of the human mind to a non-technical expression intended to direct the attention of its readership to philosophical principles presumably shared by the Aristotelian community. In this development, sensus communis significantly merged in meaning with the related notion of conceptio communis, a notion that was itself subject to a complex history of change in meaning. This ranged from very technical expressions found in Thomas Aquinas’ discussions of the intellect, Duns Scotus’ and Peter Auriol’s extensions of these to empirical and self-reflexive experiential insights, to the same type of non- technical use that sensus communis would come to have in the centuries that followed. In this paper, I study some of the most influential theories of common sense as proposed by Avicenna, Averroes, Albert the Great, Peter Olivi, the Coimbra Commentaries, and René Descartes, and I show how and why the commenting practices on Aristotle’s works facilitated the confluence of meaning between sensus communis and conceptiones communes.

Prof. Dr. Katja Krause ist Leiterin der Max-Planck-Forschungsgruppe "Experience in the Pre-Modern Sciences of Soul and Body, ca. 800–1650" und Professorin im Fachgebiet Wissenschaftsgeschichte an der TU Berlin. Sie promovierte 2014 am King's College London mit einer Dissertation zu „Aquinas' Philosophy of the Beatific Vision“. Im Rahmen eines zweijährigen Forschungsaufenthaltes am Max- Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte untersuchte sie die empirische Wende des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts, die sich aus der Aneignung von Averroes' Kommentaren zum Corpus Aristotelicum ergab. In den Jahren 2016/17 war sie Assistenzprofessorin für Mittelalterliches Denken an der Durham University (UK) und 2017/18 Postdoktorandin an der Harvard Divinity School (USA).