Common Sense and Fantasy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The old theory of internal senses remained a subject of investigation in the scholastic philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Similar ideas occurred in the works of non-scholastic philosophers as well, but usually not as one distinct subject (1). Of the former internal senses, memory was widely discussed. The estimative sense vanished except from strictly traditional scholastic philosophy. It had traditionally been closely associated with instinctual dispositions and with capacities of animals; the instincts were themselves often discussed in seventeenth-century arguments about the cognitive capacities of animals (2). The remaining internal senses, the common sense and the imagination, were dealt with by both scholastic and non-scholastic authors. As for the common sense, Descartes assumed in a traditional manner that it unifies various sensory images, but he sought a more naturalistic interpretation, omitting the traditional doctrine of transmission of species from the external senses, as many others did in the seventeenth century (3).