Philosophy and common sense
Galen Strawson on the importance of common sense in philosophy:
Common sense is fundamental in philosophy, but it doesn’t follow that view taken to be part of common sense outside philosophy must prevail within it. There’s no more reason to think this is a condition on good philosophy than it is on good science, which is constantly overturning common-sense views of the world. Common sense isn’t a matter of a body of opinions, although some opinions are a matter of common sense. It’s something one uses — a way of approaching things — and it’s typically common sense, exercised within philosophy or science, that leads to the abandonment of opinions held to be part of common sense outside philosophy — such as the idea that colour-as-we-experience-it is an objective property of objects. ‘Common Sense’ we may say that in philosophy as in science, common sense regularly leads to the rejection of Common Sense. So, too, many of the most dramatic departures from common sense within philosophy take the form of holding on at all costs to parts of Common Sense. It’s ordinary factotum common sense that needs to operate in philosophy, and the fact that it can lead to conclusions far from Common Sense is itself a matter of common sense, for it’s a matter of common sense 'that ‘when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbably, must be the truth.’ William James says that ‘metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly,’ and proper obstinacy is again, just an attitude of steady common sense in the face of the data.
Fear is probably the greatest enemy of common sense — philosophers often reach a point where they can’t face the truth — but Nietzsche picks up on another perhaps hardly less important, when he speaks of ‘philosophers…with their vice of contradiction, of innovation at any price’…Descartes concurs, remarking that when it comes to speculative matters the scholar will take the more pride in his views ‘the further they are from common sense…,since he will have had to use so much more skill and ingenuity in trying to render them plausible’…
It’s often said that argument is the heart of philosophy, and especially of analytic philosophy, but I’m sure that’s not true, if argument is thought of as primarily a matter of formally arrayed premises and conclusions. Argument in this sense is the hand maiden of philosophy, an underlaborour (the head underlabourer), to be summoned as necessary…The fundamental philosophical activity, I think, is a kind of open investigative dwelling on ideas. 1
Obviously dwelling on ideas is for some and not for all. Philosophy is not common. We might wonder, after their having dwelled on ideas, what it is philosophers bring back to us.
Galen Strawson, Real Materialism and other essays, pp.2-3