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Modern philosophy isphilosophy developed in themodern era and associated withmodernity. It is not a specific doctrine or school (and thus should not be confused withModernism), although there are certain assumptions common to much of it, which helps to distinguish it from earlier philosophy.[1]
The 17th and early 20th centuries roughly mark the beginning and the end of modern philosophy. How much of theRenaissance should be included is a matter for dispute; likewise, modernity may or may not have ended in the twentieth century and been replaced bypostmodernity. How one decides these questions will determine the scope of one's use of the term "modern philosophy."
How much of Renaissance intellectual history is part of modern philosophy is disputed:[2] TheEarly Renaissance is often considered less modern and more medieval compared to the laterHigh Renaissance. Later, by the 17th and 18th centuries, the major figures inphilosophy of mind,epistemology, andmetaphysics were roughly divided into two main groups. The "Rationalists," mostly in France and Germany, argued all knowledge must begin from certain "innate ideas" in the mind. Major rationalists wereDescartes,Baruch Spinoza,Gottfried Leibniz, andNicolas Malebranche. The "Empiricists," by contrast, held that knowledge must begin with sensory experience. Major figures in this line of thought areJohn Locke,George Berkeley, andDavid Hume (These are retrospective categories, for which Kant is largely responsible). Ethics and political philosophy are usually not subsumed under these categories, though all these philosophers worked inethics, in their own distinctive styles. Other important figures inpolitical philosophy includeThomas Hobbes andJean-Jacques Rousseau.
In the late eighteenth centuryImmanuel Kant set forth a groundbreaking philosophical system that claimed to bring unity to rationalism and empiricism. Whether or not he was right, he did not entirely succeed in ending philosophical disputes. Kant sparked a storm of philosophical work in Germany in the early nineteenth century, beginning withGerman idealism. The characteristic theme of idealism was that the world and the mind equally must be understood according to the same categories; it culminated in the work ofGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who among many other things said in the Preface to hisElements of the Philosophy of Right that "The real is rational; the rational is real."
Hegel's work was carried in many directions by his followers and critics.Karl Marx appropriated both Hegel'sphilosophy of history and the empirical ethics dominant in Britain, transforming Hegel's ideas into a strictly materialist form, setting the grounds for the development of ascience of society.Søren Kierkegaard, in contrast, dismissed allsystematic philosophy as an inadequate guide to life and meaning. For Kierkegaard, life is meant to be lived, not a mystery to be solved.Arthur Schopenhauer took idealism to the conclusion that the world was nothing but the futile endless interplay of images and desires, and advocatedatheism andpessimism. Schopenhauer's ideas were taken up and transformed byNietzsche, who seized upon their various dismissals of the world to proclaim "God is dead" and to reject all systematic philosophy and all striving for a fixed truth transcending the individual. Nietzsche found this not grounds for pessimism, but the possibility of a new kind of freedom.
19th-century British philosophy came increasingly to be dominated by strands ofBritish Idealism, which incorporated neo-Hegelian and German Idealist thought. As a reaction against this, figures such asBertrand Russell andGeorge Edward Moore began moving in the direction ofanalytic philosophy, which was essentially an updating of traditional empiricism to accommodate the new developments inlogic of the German mathematicianGottlob Frege.
Renaissance humanism emphasized the value of human beings (seeOration on the Dignity of Man) and opposeddogma andscholasticism. This new interest in human activities led to the development ofpolitical science withThe Prince ofNiccolò Machiavelli.[3] Humanists differed from Medieval scholars also because they saw the natural world as mathematically ordered and pluralistic, instead of thinking of it in terms of purposes and goals. Renaissance philosophy is perhaps best explained by two propositions made byLeonardo da Vinci in his notebooks:
In a similar way,Galileo Galilei based hisscientific method on experiments but alsodeveloped mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. These two ways to conceive human knowledge formed the background for the principle ofEmpiricism andRationalism respectively.[4]
List of Renaissance philosophers:
Modern philosophy traditionally begins withRené Descartes and his aphorism "I think, therefore I am". In the early seventeenth century the bulk of philosophy was dominated byScholasticism, written by theologians and drawing uponPlato,Aristotle, and early Church writings. Descartes argued that many predominant Scholastic metaphysical doctrines were meaningless or false. In short, he proposed to begin philosophy from scratch. In his most important work,Meditations on First Philosophy, he attempts just this, over six brief essays. He tries to set aside as much as he possibly can of all his beliefs, to determine what if anything he knows forcertain. He finds that he can doubt nearly everything: the reality of physical objects,God, his memories, history, science, even mathematics, but he cannot doubt that he is, in fact, doubting. He knows what he is thinking about, even if it is not true, and he knows that he is there thinking about it. From this basis, he builds his knowledge back up again. He finds that some of the ideas he has could not have originated from him alone, but only from God; he proves that God exists. He then demonstrates that God would not allow him to be systematically deceived about everything; in essence, he vindicates ordinary methods of science and reasoning, as fallible but not false.
List of rationalist philosophers:
Empiricism is atheory of knowledge that opposes other theories of knowledge, such as rationalism,idealism andhistoricism. Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes (only or primarily) via sensoryexperience as opposed to rationalism, which asserts that knowledge comes (also) from pure thinking. Both empiricism and rationalism are individualist theories of knowledge, whereas historicism is asocial epistemology. While historicism also acknowledges the role of experience, it differs from empiricism by assuming that sensory data cannot be understood without considering the historical and cultural circumstances in which observations are made. Empiricism should not be mixed up with empirical research because different epistemologies should be considered competing views on how best to do studies, and there is near consensus among researchers that studies should be empirical. Today empiricism should therefore be understood as one among competing ideals of getting knowledge or how to do studies. As such empiricism is first and foremost characterized by the ideal to let observational data "speak for themselves", while the competing views are opposed to this ideal. The term empiricism should thus not just be understood in relation to how this term has been used in the history of philosophy. It should also be constructed in a way that makes it possible to distinguish empiricism from other epistemological positions in contemporary science and scholarship. In other words: Empiricism as a concept has to be constructed along with other concepts, which together make it possible to make important discriminations between different ideals underlying contemporary science.
Empiricism is one of several competing views that predominate in the study of human knowledge, known as epistemology. Empiricism emphasizes the role ofexperience andevidence, especiallysensory perception, in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas ortradition[5] in contrast to, for example, rationalism which relies upon reason and can incorporate innate knowledge.
List of empiricist philosophers:
Political philosophy is the study of such topics aspolitics,liberty,justice,property,rights,law, and the enforcement of alegal code byauthority: their nature and purpose; what (if anything) makes agovernment legitimate; what rights and freedoms (if any) it should protect and how and why it should do so; what duties (if any) citizens owe to a legitimate government; and when (if ever) it may be legitimately overthrown. In avernacular sense, the term "political philosophy" often refers to a general view, or specific ethic, political belief, or attitude, aboutpolitics that does not necessarily belong to the technical discipline ofphilosophy.[6]
List of political philosophers by country:
Idealism refers to the group of philosophies that assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally a construct of the mind or otherwise immaterial.Epistemologically, idealism manifests as askepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideas—especially beliefs and values—shape society.[7] As anontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit.[8] Idealism thus rejectsphysicalist anddualist theories that fail to ascribe priority to the mind. An extreme version of this idealism can exist in the philosophical notion ofsolipsism.
List of idealist philosophers:
Existentialism is generally considered to be the philosophical and cultural movement that holds that the starting point of philosophical thinking must be the individual and the experiences of the individual. Building on that, existentialists hold thatmoral thinking andscientific thinking together do not suffice to understand human existence, and, therefore, a further set of categories, governed by the norm ofauthenticity, is necessary to understand human existence.[9][10][11]
List of existentialist philosophers:
Phenomenology is the study of the structure of experience. It is a broadphilosophical movement founded in the early years of the 20th century byEdmund Husserl, expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities ofGöttingen andMunich inGermany. The philosophy then spread toFrance, theUnited States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work.[12]
List of phenomenologists:
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice and applied back to practice to form what is calledintelligent practice.[citation needed] Important positions characteristic of pragmatism includeinstrumentalism,radical empiricism,verificationism,conceptual relativity, andfallibilism.[citation needed]There is general consensus among pragmatists that philosophy should take the methods and insights of modern science into account.[13]Charles Sanders Peirce (and hispragmatic maxim) deserves most of the credit for pragmatism,[14] along with later twentieth century contributorsWilliam James andJohn Dewey.[13]
List of pragmatist philosophers:
Analytic philosophy came to dominateEnglish-speaking countries in the 20th century. In theUnited States,United Kingdom,Canada,Scandinavia,Australia, andNew Zealand, the overwhelming majority of university philosophy departments identify themselves as "analytic" departments.[15] The term generally refers to a broad philosophical tradition[16][17] characterized by an emphasis on clarity and argument (often achieved via modernformal logic and analysis oflanguage) and a respect for thenatural sciences.[18][19][20]
List of analytic philosophers:
Various philosophical movements in Asia arose in the modern period including:
{{cite journal}}:Cite journal requires|journal= (help) inPatriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009.
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