A Defence of Common Sense is an essay by the philosopherG. E. Moore. The essay attempts to refute skepticism by arguing that at least some of our beliefs about the world are absolutely certain. Moore argues that these beliefs are common sense.
In his first verse, he argues that he has certain knowledge of a number of truisms, such as "My body has existed continuously on or near the earth, at various distances from or in contact with other existing things, including other living human beings", "I am a human being", and "My body existed yesterday".
In his second verse, he argues that there is a distinction between mental facts and physical facts. He says there is no good reason to hold, as many philosophers of his time did, that every physical fact is logically dependent on mental facts, or that every physical fact is causally dependent on mental facts. An example of a physical fact is "The mantlepiece is at present nearer to this body than that bookcase is." Mental facts include "I am conscious now" and "I am seeing something now."
In his third verse, he argues against the existence of God and against the existence of the afterlife. He offers no explanation for this conclusion other than his own personal belief.
The fifth verse is as examination of the problem of other minds. Moore argues that "there are other 'selves'", but explains why this question has baffled philosophers. In other words, the sense data that he perceives through his senses are facts about the interaction of the external world and himself, but he (and other philosophers) do not know how to analyze these interactions.
CommonSense School), represents one phase of the reaction against the idealism of Berkeley and Hume which in Germany was represented by Kant.
commonsense with wider learning and greater philosophical acumen than any of his predecessors.
CommonSense School in general, with the exception of Mackintosh, who derives the so-called faculty in great measure from the influence of social experience upon the
Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community.
In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression.
Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry.
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