Summary
What do we mean by 'common sense'? In 1925 the philosopher GE Moore wrote a Defence of Common Sense which argued against philosophical idealism, on the grounds that it seemed to deny a set of propositions that he claimed were indisputably true. His colleague Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a detailed response to Moore's paper, and its influence extended into the work of contemporaries like Susan Stebbing. How do we understand common sense now? What role does common sense play in politics? Matthew Sweet's guests are the philosopher Dr Rachael Wiseman, the politician Ann Widdecombe, the historian of emotion Dr Tiffany Watt Smith and the journalist and scholar of post colonial culture Dr Sarah Jilani.
Producer: Luke Mulhall
Transcript
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| 0:42.4 | Matthew Sweet. Hello, the subject of this program is blindingly obvious. It's about the things |
| 0:48.8 | we don't discuss because, well, they're self-evident. Everybody knows them. Everybody does them. Everybody |
| 0:55.0 | thinks them. They're common sense. What are those things? What is common sense? Well, now you're |
| 1:01.9 | asking, most people ought to have it because it's common. And they must have quite a lot of it, |
| 1:07.9 | because if they don't, other people always seem quite keen to point it out. |
| 1:12.2 | So tell you what, we have guests here. We could use them as a kind of focus group and just ask them to start making common sense statements, |
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