Common sense, its epistemological and religious usage in Avicenna`s illuminative philosophy

Democratizing Taste: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and Elizabeth Hamilton

Common Sense Philosophy and American Political Theology: Preliminary Considerations

A "political theology," as I use the term here, is a society's understanding of its ultimate meaning in the context of reality as a whole, and in particular in light of what is taken to be divine or ultimate reality. Because human beings collectively as well as individually need their lives to have meaning, they will have a political theology of some sort, whether explicit or implicit, whether ...

Epistemological Metaphors and the Nature of Philosophy

This article examines some of the most important metaphors and analogies that epistemologists have used to discuss the structure and validity of knowledge. After reviewing foundational, coherentist, and other metaphors for knowledge, we discuss the metaphilosophical significance of the prevalence of such metaphors. We argue that they support a view of philosophy as akin to science rather than p...

Critical Realism: a Common Sense Philosophy for Environmental Education?

By and large, modern societies take it for granted that nature, or ‘the environment’, is apart from society. However, this separation promotes the view that the environment should be managed for profit or pleasure, or that it exists in exotic or wild places experienced only as a fantasy world. As a result, environmental problems are seen to arise ‘out there’ instead of inside our heads, which c...

Perceptual Categories Derived from Reid’s “Common Sense” Philosophy

The 18th-century Scottish 'common sense' philosopher Thomas Reid argued that perception can be distinguished on several dimensions from other categories of experience, such as sensation, illusion, hallucination, mental images, and what he called 'fancy.' We extend his approach to eleven mental categories, and discuss how these distinctions, often ignored in the empirical literature, bear on cur...

Swinburne`s epistemological principles in the proof of religious experience

This article has no abstract.