What is the the difference between common sense and phronesis?

Question

For refference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_sense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phronesis

For me this started with Giambattista Vico who pretty much had the same idea of "common sense" we are used to: the wisdom/mindfulness of shared practical experience. However Vico's contemporary Descartes used the term to denote some sort of common perceptual interface where the five senses combine before being passed to the spirit.

The ancient Greeks had the term "phronesis" similar to Vico's use of "common sense". While Aristotle used "common sense" more like Descartes later did. Now all that would be fine, except Vico was a critic of the newfangled Cartesian method in favor of the ancient forms of rhetoric...

Question: Where did the concept 'common sense' originate, and when did it solidify? Does common sense still feature in contemporary philosophy?

Answer 1

Origin

'Common sense' in a philosophical context has often been used contrastively. For instance, Claude Buffier (1661-1737), oppposed common sense to Cartesian scepticism, or what passed for such since Descartes was not a sceptic.

Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753) opposed common sense to the manifest nonsense, as he saw it, of material substance.

A fully-fledged defence of common sense dates from the Scottish School of the 18th century : take Thomas Reid's An Inquiry into the Human MInd on the Principles of Common Sense (1764). Reid influenced both Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) and Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856).

Btw Aristotle does recognise 'common sense' when he takes into consideration, as in the Nicomachean Ethics and elsewhere, 'ta endoxa' - widely held beliefs. He is seldom willing to ignore these, even if he rejects them or refines them out of all recognition.

Response to query

Speaking of Aristotle, how did he use 'phronesis' and how did he relate it to 'ta endoxa'?

D.J. Allan can help here. 'How did Aristotle use 'phronesis' ?

The central figure ... is the man (sic) of practical wisdom (phronesis) in whom habitual rightness of desire is combined with habitual truth of judgement, and who is equally competent in formulating general rules of action and in applying them to the swiftly changing situations of life, in such a way as to do justice to all concerned. It is the intuitive judgement of such a man which serves as the criterion of right action for all who do not yet feel confident of their own power of decision. Not that by his judgement he can make actions right or wrong. He is, to some extent, simply a faithful interpreter of prevailing moral standards, who can point out what society would demand in the given case. (D.J. Allan, The Philosophy of Aristotle, Oxford: OUP, 1970: 133.)

'Prevailing moral standards' are not seen as merely conventional; Aristotle is no moral relativist. He has a teleological view of the world in which the moral life of the polis or city-state is appropriate to human nature.

Now for ta endoxa.

Ordinary moral thinking, which ta endoxa represent, is the range of recognised or received opinions. It generally contains a kernel of truth, even the essence of a matter, but it does not necessarily articulate the exact moral truth:

But again - and this side of the picture ought not to be ignored - he [the phronomos, the practically wise man: GT] has considered these standards more carefully than the average man; he can justify them by a philosophical view of man's place in the universe, and perhaps in some rare cases propose to modify them. (D.J. Allan: 133.)

Persistence

The philosophy of mind, or philosophical psychology, is a test case. There is a split approach. On the one hand, writers such as Donald Davidson and Jennifer Hornsby work within the tradition of common sense or 'folk' psychology, conceptualising with a great deal of sophistication ideas of action, intention, weakness of will and the general run of concepts which we use to interpret the mental life of ourselves and others. (But justice cannot be done to Davidson in a few words.) On the other hand, philosophers such as Stephen Stitch and the Churchlands regard folk psychology as pre-scientific and they foresee the wholesale replacement of such psychology with one that correlates or identifies psychological states and events with neurophysiological ones, and generates a new vocabulary for the mind - one in which the concept of the 'mind' itself is unlikely to survive as too tainted with folk or common sense psychology.

Answer 2

The two terms are very distinct from each other.

Common sense

Even "common sense" has two distinct meanings:

Sensus communis

"[T]he common sense (sensus communis, κοινὴ αἴσθησις) apprehends the things sensed by all the proper senses." (Summa contra Gentiles II cap. 74 [10.]).

For example, when one sees and hears a person singing, his common sense unifies the visual and auditory sense data together into one sense object, a singing person.

Sens commun

Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., defines sens commun (≠ sensus communis) in his Reality ch. 4:

All these principles are the principles of our natural intelligence. They are first manifested in that spontaneous form of intelligence which we call common sense, that is, the natural aptitude of intelligence, before all philosophic culture, to judge things sanely. Common sense, natural reason, seizes these self-evident principles from its notion of intelligible reality. But this natural common sense could not yet give these principles an exact and universal formulation.

_{another definition of sens commun, from his Le Sens Commun p. 1}

_{natural intelligence […] our primordial and fundamental knowledge: knowledge of rational first principles, common to all men, of the moral law necessary for the life of individuals and peoples; natural knowledge of the existence of God, principle and end of all things; knowledge of the supernatural mysteries which revelation explains in terms of commonsense so they are accessible to the intellects [of those] in all countries and times.
intelligence naturelle […] nos connaissances primordiales et fondamentales: connaissance des premiers principes rationnelles, communs à tous les hommes, et de la loi morale, nécessaire à la vie des individus et des peuples; connaissance naturelle de l'existence de Dieu, principe et fin de toutes choses; connaissance des mystères surnaturels dont la révélation s'exprime en termes de sens commun pour être accessible à toutes les intelligences de tous les pays et de tous les temps.}

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Phronesis

Phronesis is a synonym for wisdom (sapientia), the habitus or virtue that "consists in the knowledge of the highest causes (cognitione altissimarum causarum)" (SCG I cap. 94).

A highest cause is the ultimate or final cause (end, τέλος).
_{(A final cause is called the "cause of causes".)}

II-II q. 9 a. 2 co.:

[If] certitude of the judgment is derived from the highest cause, the knowledge has a special name, which is wisdom: for a wise man in any branch of knowledge is one who knows the highest cause of that kind of knowledge, and is able to judge of all matters by that cause: and a wise man "absolutely," is one who knows the cause which is absolutely highest, namely God.

For example, a wise mathematician would be one who knows why the axioms of algebra are what they are, not just what they are.

See also Aristotle's Metaphysics 1.2, that "Wisdom Considers Universal First Causes and First Principles."