Abstract
The internal senses, which, generally speaking, included common sense, the imagination, the estimative faculty, and memory had a central place in the Renaissance understanding of the workings of the human mind. Understood as perceptual powers which mediated between the subject and the object of knowledge, they were considered essential to organize the sensory perceptions individually received by the five external senses into unified representations. Most authors treated common sense and the estimative faculty as powers of the imagination, which was doubtless the most important of the internal senses. Memory, as the ability to visualize what is no longer there, was also often considered part of the imagination, and its role become increasingly important, as testified by the central role of mnemonics in conceptions of the human mind.
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Corrias, A. (2022). Senses, Internal. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14169-5_1062
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