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Relying on Kantian notions of judgement, Sjöholm explores its relevance and applications in Arendt’s aesthetics. Arendt argues that taste alone cannot be the requisite of judgement. Historically, racism and xenophobia can corrupt taste a pure category, such as the corrupt ideology of the Third Reich. Arendt critiques Kant by arguing that, both, aesthetics operates at the level of appearances and appearances can be corrupted by totalitarian regimes and thought. Perception – which is offered as sedimentation of appearances - informs aesthetics. Narratives solidify a sense of the real community and can similarly pervert perception through ideology. As always, Arendt is historically considering The Third Reich in the background of all theorizing, and Sjöholm is directly engaging with Arendt’s political commitment. Arendt locates the ‘sensus communis’ away from the transcendental logic of Kant, and towards the plurality of the public sphere. Arendt’s ‘sensus communis’ is the solidification of a collective, plural and political body towards a new reality; the integration of plurality of senses through the production of a community

This chapter provides a general discussion of the internal senses and their differences in structure from the external senses. Aquinas posits that the four internal senses of sensus communis, imagination (vis imaginativa), vis cogitativa (the vis aestimativa in animals), and the sense memory (vis memorativa) are necessary in order to account for the pre-analytic facets of sense knowledge and perceptual awareness. The chapter also provides an analysis of the difference between ‘senses’ and ‘sensorium’, and explains what Aquinas and Aristotle often refer to as the ‘seat of consciousness’. This internal sense faculty of the sensus communis combines the sensible forms received from the external senses—a far cry from several contemporary Aquinas scholars who suggest that a phantasm is the object of the sensus communis.

This chapter looks at another narrative mechanism that an author could use to imply that there was a “law” governing the text: humor. This is not, as the chapter shows through a discussion of Romantic and Victorian writings on the subject, a humor that was defined by its ability to make a reader laugh. Rather, humor was a strategy used to produce, in the reader, the experience of unspoken agreement and shared community with others. Unlike Oliver Twist, David Copperfield does not rely on an inaccessible back-story. Instead, it relies on a shared understanding, but one so implicit that it seems to be more of an intuitive sense than any sort of rational knowledge. It relies, in other words, on the idea of sensus communis (common sense). The narrative of David's progression is always measured against this backdrop of an anonymously judging public of which he is part, and the novel's narrative method seeks to move him into agreement with that public. The novel thus uses humor to underscore the idea that one's individual intuitions are shared, though in ways that are difficult to conceptualize. Charles Dickens's narrative technique makes use of an externalization, into the social sphere, of a reader's individual feeling.

The preamble to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights speaks of the “human family,” a metaphor that substitutes a biological concept alluding to the human species for a political idea alluding to the human kind, and which dangerously postulates that kinship is, or ought to be, the naturally tender bond founding free and just political communities. This chapter examines the claim of the human family metaphor to bridge the heterogeneity of the political and biological domains as being akin—indeed identical—to Kant’s claim that sensus communis (the postulate of aesthetic reason) bridges the natural and the ethical domains. Jacques Rancière’s reading of Plato’s contention that democracy began when the rules of music were no longer observed is here reinterpreted to imply that aesthetics is the transcendental, and by no means empirical, ground for democracy. Whereas in political matters humanity as a community of feelings has time and again proved to imply the most dangerous confusion between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, it is legitimately invoked in aesthetic matters.

This chapter explores the internal sense faculty, which Aristotle sometimes refers to as the ‘phantasia’, and argues that several contemporary Aquinas commentators have not developed four-square accounts of the imagination or of phantasia. Aquinas appears to be using the term itself (phantasia) to apply to all three faculties of the internal sensorium—the imagination, the vis cogitativa, and the sense memory; this appears counter to his earlier reference to the phantasia as a term illustrative only of the imagination. The incidental object of sense is the specific sensible object of the vis cogitativa. Furthermore, the chapter suggests that Descartes in the Sixth Meditation blurs the sensus communis with the imagination, and this conceptual blur can lead one down the slippery slope of representationalism.

This chapter focuses on the Bildungsroman, studying the philosophical and literary significance of the novel of development. Through readings of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, it suggests that the ethical foundations of the concept of Bildung—and in particular the idea of sensus communis (common sense)—made form in the Bildungsroman, lay the groundwork for one's own understanding of what makes a novel count as an object of study. The operating principle in the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman is the discovery that one is already a member of a community, and that one's decisions can be understood as stemming from that community. Proper cultivation means the development of a character that can understand and respond to the pre-existing, yet unconscious, shared consensus: the sensus communis. This sort of reciprocity between individual and community is actually a better description of how moral intuition worked, at its more refined levels, than references to physical sensation.

This chapter revisits section 9 for a close reading and an attempt to go through the unresolved issues it raises, which are all the more important that its opening sentence states, “the solution of [the] problem [of whether the pleasure precedes the judgment or the judgment is the pleasure] is the key to the critique of taste.” This transcendental “chicken-and-egg” dilemma undergoes several formulations—as the pleasure taken in the free play of imagination and understanding preceding the pleasure taken in the object, or as the “universality of the subjective conditions of the judging” preceding the “universal subjective validity of satisfaction”—but never yields the proper transcendental solution. Particular attention is given the “state of mind” (Gemütszustand), which Kant says accompanies all acts of intellection but is itself in the nature of a feeling rather than of cognition. The interpretive hypothesis that guides the close reading of section 9—or indeed the reading of the whole third Critique—is that the task of bridging nature and freedom is bestowed on a curious amphiboly of the concept of duty that subreptitiously calls on practical reason from within the free play of imagination and understanding. Remarks on the transcendental subject as supersensible substratum conclude the chapter.

What are aesthetic judgments according to Kant? How do they work? What do they mean to us? Why do we make them? In simple terms, this chapter argues that in supposing the presence of the faculty of taste in each of us, judgments about natural beauty postulate that all humans are endowed with what Kant called sensus communis, here interpreted as the faculty of agreeing by dint of feeling. However, being a postulate, our endowment with sensus communis in the empirical world is forever indemonstrable. It is and remains an idea of reason, theoretically necessary and ethically mandatory. That admitted, the “Kant after Duchamp approach” consists in asking ourselves if anything fundamental would have to be changed to Kant’s thesis if we updated Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment for “post-Duchamp” times by substituting an artifact for a natural object and replacing the judgment “this is beautiful” with “this is art.” The answer is no.

Underlying the two views of democracy in terms of commonality and political freedom are two different mental pictures of how people share. This chapter draws out these two mental pictures from a reading of Danielle Allen’s account of the integration of Little Rock High School in 1957. The first – the objective picture of sharing – holds that sharing requires sharing some thing in common that is objectively real and independent of those who share it. This picture is what drives democratic theorists to focus on what the demos shares in common, and ironically undergirds an antidemocratic approach to politics in which elites seem best positioned to determine the content of commonality. The second picture – an intersubjective picture – is derived here from a critical engagement with Hannah Arendt – and holds that people share when they have a first-person experience of themselves as inhabiting the world together with plural others. This picture highlights the role that all humans play in building and sustaining a world that can be experienced as common. That is, it highlights humanity’s ordinary and radically democratic capacity for political freedom: the capacity to shape the world we share in common with others.

Elite colonists in the port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston sought to construct a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. They turned to material artifacts as a means of building networks between people. Through purchase of common goods and similar modes of object use, colonial consumers formulated communities of taste that drew individuals together. Colonists relied upon the power of assemblage to transform their individual identities and to create a sensus communis. The portraits painted by Joseph Blackburn in Bermuda and New England illuminate the regional divergences in transatlantic polite culture and point to the local bonds forged through artifacts and objects’ power to assemble the social.

The term ‘mind’ (mano) is used in a confused range of different and contradictory senses in the early Pāli canon. Buddhaghosa will impose order by distinguishing distinct cognitive modules, each with its proper domain of cognitive work. Early perception, the subliminal orienting, and initial reception of a stimulus into the perceptual process, is the function of ‘mind-element’ (mano-dhātu), a low-level cognitive system. Late perception and working memory is the function of a high-level cognitive system, ‘mind-discrimination-element’ (mano-viññāṇa-dhātu). In deference to ancient Buddhist tradition, Buddhaghosa refers to six sense-modalities, the sixth being called ‘mind’ (mano). Just as each of the five types of sensory datum enters perceptual processing though a proprietary sense-door, so the objects of mind enter through a ‘mind-door’. However, this is not a sixth channel, a window onto a proprietary sort of mental object, but is nothing other than the door gating projection into short-term working memory.

This chapter provides further development of Aquinas’s theory of sensation and perception in terms of the necessary conditions for sight. It begins with a discussion of the intentional act of seeing in explicating Aquinas on sensation, and provides an analysis of the importance of the diaphanum or medium and the role light plays in the act of seeing. The first part of this analysis pertains to the mental acts proper to the external sensorium—the external senses and the sensus communis. The second part pertains to the mental acts proper to the internal sensorium—the three internal senses of the imagination (vis imaginativa), the vis cogitativa, and the sense memory (vis memorativa).