Despite living in an “information age,” we are confronted by the clash of ideologies and a crisis of universal knowledge. The Church is not unaffected by the world’s weariness and similarly faces what Fr. Mauro Gagliardi describes as “the lack of truth, or perhaps better, the disinterest in it.” Today’s philosophical and doctrinal decline are the results of the loss of first principles and a relativistic view of doctrinal development. As Matthew Levering writes in the Foreword, this first-time English translation of Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s Le sens commun: La philosophie de l’être et les formules dogmatiques by the acclaimed translator Matthew Minerd “arrives at an auspicious time.” This book sees the great Dominican master address a variety of fundamental topics that we need to return to and relearn in our day: the relationship between common sense and both philosophy and faith; the proper defense for philosophical realism; the subordination and coordination of philosophical first principles; our natural capacity for knowing God’s existence; and, at length, the problem of dogmatic development. Although originally written during the Catholic Modernist crisis at the turn of the twentieth century, Thomistic Common Sense is no mere relic of past controversies. Jacques Maritain, for example, while reflecting on his formation as a Thomist, cited it as particularly influential. In our own time, this book serves as a foundational textbook of Thomistic philosophy, communicating its wisdom with clarity, power, and perennial resonance.

Common sense philosophy was one of the Scottish Enlightenment's most original intellectual products. The nine specially written essays in this volume explore the philosophical and historical significance of this school of thought, recovering the ways in which it developed during the long eighteenth century.

"The heresy of heresies was common sense." --George Orwell, 1984. This book is a defense of common-sense realism, which is the greatest heresy of our time. Following common-sense philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Dallas Willard, and J. P. Moreland, this book defends a common-sense vision of reality within the Christian tradition. Mosteller shows how common-sense realism is more reasonable than the materialist, idealist, pragmatist, existentialist, and relativist spirits of our age. It maintains that we can know the nature of reality through common-sense experience and that this knowledge has profound implication for living the good life and being a good person.