Modern Philosophy(philosophy, wiki, forked, Proteus)
Modern philosophy is
Philosophy done during the "modern" era of
Europe and
North America. It is not a specific doctrine or school, (and so should not be confused with
Modernism or
Modernity) although there are certain assumptions common to much of it distinguishing it from
Renaissance Philosophy and
Contemporary Philosophy periods.
Is Modern Philosophy Modern?
The modern period runs
roughly from the beginning of the 17th century until the present. How much of
Renaissance Philosophy, some of which was called "modern" at the time, is to be included in Modern Philosophy is still a matter of dispute; Nineteenth-century Philosophy is often treated as its own period, as it was dominated by
Post-Kantian German and
idealist philosophers like
Hegel,
Marx, and
Bradley, as well as many other important thinkers such as
John Stuart Mill,
Arthur Schopenhauer and
Friedrich Nietzsche.
Likewise,
Modernity may or may not have ended in the 20th century and been replaced by
Post-Modernity. How one decides these questions will determine the scope of one's use of "Modern Philosophy", and this illustrates the futility of classifying Philosophy into neat historical groupings. We will see this again as what is called "Contemporary Philosophy" is no longer contemporary, but dominated by the Philosophy of the 1950's, 60's and 70's, and in many ways Philosophy has already changed into something
new.
History of Modern Philosophy
The major figures in
Philosophy of Mind,
Epistemology, and
Metaphysics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are roughly divided into two main groups. The "
Rationalists," mostly in France and Germany, assumed that all knowledge must begin from certain "innate ideas" in the mind. Major Rationalists were
Descartes,
Spinoza,
Leibniz, and
Nicolas Malebranche. The "
Empiricists," by contrast, held that knowledge must begin with sensory experience. Major figures in this line of thought are
Locke,
George_Berkeley, and
Hume.
Ethics and
Political Philosophy are usually not subsumed under these categories, though all these philosophers worked on ethics in their own distinctive styles. Other important figures here are
Hobbes and
Rousseau.
In the late eigteenth century
Immanuel Kant set forth a groudbreaking philosophical system which claimed to bring unify rationalism and empiricism. WHether or not he was right, he did not precisely succeed in ending philosophical dispute. Kant sparked a storm of philosophical work in Germany in the early nineteenth century. This was
German Idealism; its characteristic theme was that the world and the mind equally must be understood according to the same categories; it culminated in the work of
Hegel, who among many other things said that "The real is rational; the rational is real."
Hegel's work was carried in many directions by his students; most notably,
Karl Marx appropriated both Hegel's philosophy of history and the empirical ethics dominant in Britain, transforming Hegel's ideas into a strictly materialist form, to be used as a tool for
revolution. At the opposite end of the spectrum,
Kierkegaard turned philosophy into an internal and religious endeavour.
Schopenhauer took Idealism to the conclusion that the world was nothing but the futile endless interplay of images and desires, and advocated atheism and pessimism. Kierkegaard's and Schopenhauer's ideas were taken up and transformed by Nietzsche, 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, though, found in this not a grounds for pessimism, but the possibility of a new kind of freedom.
Continental Rationalism is sometimes extended to include
Rousseau,
Kant and post-Kantian Idealism, and
Empiricism is sometimes extended back to cover
Francis Bacon and
Hobbes and forward to cover
John Stuart Mill and the
Utilitarians, and is sometimes even treated as contiuous with twentieth-century
Analytic Philosophy.
During the nineteenth century British philosophy came increasigly to be dominated by strands of neo-Hegelisn thought; it was exasperation with these that led Russell and Moore in the direction that became analytic philosophy.
American philosophers began to influence ideas from their Universities, and later, the first
World War changed everything, leading to
contemporary trends in philosophy still reverberating.
Influences of Modern Philosophy
Despite the rather arbitrary and haphazard way Modern Philosophy is defined, there is no dispute about the strong influences from such philosophers as
David Hume,
Immanuel Kant,
GWF Hegel,
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Nietzsche, to name but a few. Modern thinkers truly defined the playing field on which philosophers still operate.
Hume's style of Philosophy continues in many ways through the development of Science, later the
Philosophy of Science. Sorting out
Kant' questions became an industry all to itself, becoming
Post-Kantian, and
Neo-Kantian in spirit.
Hegel,
Marx, and
Nietzsche continued to steer
Contemporary Philosophy through more recent adherents and modifiers, such as
Jacques Derrida,
Louis Althusser or
Georges Bataille.
In this light, Philosophy is still modern, when it is still "Contemporary" in tone, and one can think of the whole of Philosophy done from
Giordano Bruno to
Jean Baudrillard as "modern". This modern way, it could be called, is that of questioning all tradition and assumptions, contrasted with the general characteristic of
Ancient Philosophy, dominated by the first questions, and later
Medieval Philosophy, dominated by rationality and
faith. Yet, even these constructs have exceptions...
Some content adapted from the Wikinfo article "Modern_philosophy" under the GNU Free Documentation License.
(last updated by Proteus, 1:02am EDT - Wed, Apr 04 2007)
