soul
Common Sense
κοινὴ αἴσθησις
A sense behind the senses: the inner faculty that binds sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell into a single perceiving self.
Aristotle noticed that the five senses cannot do everything on their own. Something must unite their reports so we know that the same sweet thing we see is also the thing we taste, and something must let us perceive qualities like motion, shape, size, and number that no single sense owns alone. This integrating power he called the "common sense," and to it he also assigned a deeper task: the awareness that we are perceiving at all. It is the hinge between raw sensation and a unified, self-aware experience of the world.
Where this idea shows up
3 Greek sourcesWhere to read it
- Theaetetus369 BCEPlato· Athens
- Discourses108 CEEpictetus· Nicopolis