Fourth of July Vapor Lock
by
Neon Gloom
06/30/2008, 7:46 PM #
Some Scottish Enlightenment thinkers advocated the "common sense" philosophy. Thomas Reid was a Scottish minister who was at times a philosophical adversary of the more skeptical David Hume.
Historians have ascertained the prevalent works found in various founders’ libraries, and Reid apparently made Thomas Jefferson’s reading list. Reid’s common sense philosophy found an American conduit through such figures as Dr. Benjamin Rush and James Wilson. There is also a French connection to his inquires concerning self-evident truths.
Thomas Reid paid homage to Claude Buffier, a Jesuit whose common sense philosophy was predicated on self-evident truths. Buffier defined the concept as those "truths which this disposition of nature obliges us to accept can be neither proved nor disproved; they are practically followed even by those who reject them speculatively."
Voltaire described Father Buffier as "the only Jesuit who has imparted a reasonable system of philosophy."
Previously, Giambattista Vico termed the general condition as sensus communis, otherwise known as "judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, and entire nation, or the entire human race..." Vico’s work was titled the New Science. Thomas Paine’s work was Common Sense, and it proved to arouse a significant portion of the American sensus communis.
The Declaration of Independence musters some identification of self-evident truths within the framework of common sense philosophy. The notion of equality is based upon an idealistic formation that is followed practically although periodically encumbered by our observations of reality, such as what later transpired at places like Antietam, Gettysburg, Birmingham and Selma.
The Declaration stated: "We hold these truths to be self-evident," and Thomas Jefferson envisioned the document as "an expression of the American mind."
