DR. JOHNSON'S TRADITION

Aristotle's careful attention to, and respect for, common forms of speech makes him the first of the common sense philosophers. However, if we concentrate on modern philosophy, we can begin with the not-too-surprising point that common sense became a topic of philosophical importance when it was challenged in a concerted manner. Descartes did this by arguing that all we believe is subject to doubt until set upon a foundation of clear and distinct ideas, which he took to be the geometric properties of matter. The empiricists also sought secure starting-points for knowledge, but found them instead in the givens of sensation. Neither of these philosophical movements welcomed the skeptical conclusions many drew from their ideas; rationalists and empiricists had the more laudable goal of redirecting philosophy towards the methods of deductive and experimental science. But the problem they introduced into philosophy was the difficult one of finding a way out from the contents of consciousness to the external world; and the difficulty of doing so led to various skeptical conclusions being drawn. The empiricist epistemology inevitably seemed to invite a solipsism of the present moment. Berkeley was read as arguing that matter did not exist, that the only reality to material objects lay in their being perceived. Hume did not go as far as to deny the existence of the objects that cause sensation, but claimed that all we could know were the sensations. These empiricist philosophies were largely responsible for the rise of a school of common sense. However, much of the common sense reaction to empiricism can be found in Hume's own writings, as he had a characteristically complex attitude to skepticism.