In this paper I offer an interpretation of what Immanuel Kant regarded as a central formulation in his Critique of Judgment, a formulation which, despite the importance Kant attached to it, seems to have been little considered by his recent interpreters. The assumption underlying my interpretation is that when Kant defined taste as a kind of common sense his arguments belonged to the long tradition of the idea of internal sensation, which had worked its way from Greek philosophy – principally the De anima and Parva naturalia of Aristotle – through Arabic philosophy and European thought of the Middle Ages, on into modern times. Recent readings of Kant's Critique of Judgment ignore his demonstration and characterization of a sensus communis aestheticus, no doubt because the faculty psychology to which the internal senses were fundamental has in general been in poor standing in the modern period (although it is everywhere to be found in ordinary language). Also, “common sense” as a philosophical criterion, while it certainly has had its supporters, has just as certainly had its detractors, especially in matters of aesthetics. Both the idea of common sense and its tradition were much more complex than modern treatments of the term allow, however. I will argue that Kant adapted and synthesized a number of traditional meanings of common sense, uniting them at the highest level in a new, transcendental version of a “public” or “social” sense. His formulation applied in fundamental ways to the deeply rhetorical discourse of classical Western art, to which the question of the relation of art to audience was central.