Two summers ago, two teenage boys died while cliff diving into Lake Superior. At Black Beach, near Silver Bay, they apparently misjudged the dangerous waves and the shock of the frigid water.

People grappling with a lack of common sense was the specialty of the godfather of common sense and logic, the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who died in 322 BC. He helped develop the syllogism: if this then that. His teaching spread throughout the world.

French writer and philosopher Voltaire, who died in 1778, is widely associated with the phrase, "Common sense is not so common."

Here in the United States, an influence for the Constitution was Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” In the book, Paine laid out a vision of “an age of intellectual freedom, when reason would triumph over superstition, (and)

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