Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World

by Robert Curry, Brian T. Kennedy (Foreword by)

Overview

Common sense is the foundation of thinking and of human action. It is the indispensable basis for making our way in the world as individuals and in community with others, and the starting point for finding truth and building scientific knowledge. The philosophy of common-sense realism deeply informed the American Founders’ vision for a self-governing people, in a society where leaders and average citizens share essentially the same understanding of reality—of what simply makes sense.

But today our confidence in the value and reliability of common sense has been badly shaken. Deep thinkers have rejected it. Elites have learned to disdain it. We’re told that we have moved into a more sophisticated world, where common sense is passé and the very concept of truth is outmoded. Indeed, the Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as the Word of the Year for 2016.

Do we actually live in a post-truth reality? Have we moved beyond common sense? Can we?

In this book, Robert Curry exposes the absurdity of the attacks on common sense, and demonstrates that we still live and move in the realm of common sense in our every waking moment. Drawing from philosophy and literature, science and psychiatry, Reclaiming Common Sense helps us regain our trust in the “superpower” we all have in common, while reminding us that we cannot get along without it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781641770750
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	09/24/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	480 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert Curry is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea (Encounter Books). He serves on the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute. His articles and reviews have appeared in American Greatness, the American Thinker, the Claremont Review of Books, the Federalist, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In the modern intellectual climate, the basic rationality of common sense has been unsettled, and sometimes altogether eclipsed, by dreamworld ideologies and personal ‘truths’ asserted in defiance of elementary facts of experience. The revolt against common sense has moved beyond the universities to take hold of our political and cultural institutions, in coercive government policies and public shaming. Against the feverish assault, Robert Curry sounds a note of cool sanity, presenting common sense in simple (though not simplistic) terms and illustrating it in living color. For level-headed readers disoriented by the craziness, this little book will be a bracing tonic.”
—Scott Philip Segrest, Associate Professor of Political Science at The Citadel and author of America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense

“In his second companion volume about common sense, Robert Curry again reminds us that our leisured and affluent society periodically dismisses the fundamental Western way of knowledge that ensures our collective success. Or at least it says it does in its periodic relativist, romantic, and emotional flirtations with thoughts that are not grounded in reality. This book is a much-needed reminder in our postmodern age that what works and what we perceive to be real are alone real.”
—Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“In his entertaining, insightful, and highly literate new book, Robert Curry gives the ‘superpower’ that is common sense its proper due. Here’s hoping that members of the political class read Curry’s book, and in so doing find within themselves the humble qualities that might cause them to do less so that we the people can do more.”
—John Tamny, Vice President of FreedomWorks

“What Robert Curry started simply and beautifully in Common Sense Nation he continues in Reclaiming Common Sense: the revival, defense, and application of the principles needed to save America and Western civilization.”
—Ryan P. Williams, President of the Claremont Institute and Publisher of the Claremont Review of Books

“Having recovered in Common Sense Nation the important role of common sense on the nation’s founding, Robert Curry has written a thoughtful, passionate analysis of the social and political ills that have followed the abandonment of common sense in our country’s culture. From appeasement of jihadism to the follies of self-selected gender identities, Curry provides a powerful, must-read warning of the dangers to our principles of self-government and our political freedom by neglecting ‘common sense realism’ in our policies both at home and abroad.”
—Bruce S. Thornton, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University