Modern philosophy
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Modern philosophy is
The 17th and early 20th centuries roughly mark the beginning and the end of modern philosophy. How much of the Renaissance should be included is a matter for dispute; likewise modernity may or may not have ended in the twentieth century and been replaced by postmodernity. How one decides these questions will determine the scope of one's use of the term "modern philosophy."
Modern Western philosophy
How much of Renaissance intellectual history is part of modern philosophy is disputed:
In the late eighteenth century Immanuel Kant set forth a groundbreaking philosophical system which claimed to bring unity to rationalism and empiricism. Whether or not he was right, he did not entirely succeed in ending philosophical dispute. Kant sparked a storm of philosophical work in Germany in the early nineteenth century, beginning with German 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 of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who among many other things said in the Preface to his Elements 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.
19th-century British philosophy came increasingly to be dominated by strands of
Renaissance philosophy
Renaissance humanism emphasized the value of human beings (see Oration on the Dignity of Man) and opposed dogma and scholasticism. This new interest in human activities led to the development of political science with The Prince of Niccolò 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 by Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks:
- All of our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions
- There is no certainty where one can neither apply any of the mathematical sciences nor any of those which are based upon the mathematical sciences.
In a similar way, Galileo Galilei based his scientific method on experiments but also developed mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. These two ways to conceive human knowledge formed the background for the principle of Empiricism and Rationalism respectively.[4]
List of Renaissance philosophers:
- Pico della Mirandola
- Nicolas of Cusa
- Giordano Bruno
- Galileo Galilei
- Niccolò Machiavelli
- Michel de Montaigne
- Francisco Suárez
- M Adeel Qureshi
Rationalism
Modern philosophy traditionally begins with
List of rationalist philosophers:
- Christian Wolff
- René Descartes
- Baruch Spinoza
- Gottfried Leibniz
Empiricism
Empiricism is a
Empiricism is one of several competing views that predominate in the study of human knowledge, known as epistemology. Empiricism emphasizes the role of
in contrast to, for example, rationalism which relies upon reason and can incorporate innate knowledge.List of empiricist philosophers:
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as
List of political philosophers by country:
- United Kingdom
- France
- Italy
- Germany
Idealism
Idealism refers to the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally a construct of the mind or otherwise immaterial.
List of idealist philosophers:
- Immanuel Kant
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- T. H. Green
- Francis Herbert Bradley
- Josiah Royce
- J. M. E. McTaggart
- John Foster
Existentialism
Existentialism is generally considered to be the philosophical and cultural movement which holds that the starting point of philosophical thinking must be the individual and the experiences of the individual. Building on that, existentialists hold that moral thinking and scientific thinking together do not suffice to understand human existence, and, therefore, a further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to understand human existence.[9][10][11]
List of existentialist philosophers:
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Karl Jaspers
- Gabriel Marcel
- Martin Heidegger
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is the study of the structure of experience. It is a broad
List of phenomenologist:
Pragmatism
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 called intelligent practice.[citation needed] Important positions characteristic of pragmatism include instrumentalism, radical empiricism, verificationism, conceptual relativity, and fallibilism.[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 his pragmatic maxim) deserves most of the credit for pragmatism,[14] along with later twentieth century contributors William James and John Dewey.[13]
List of pragmatist philosophers:
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy came to dominate
List of analytic philosophers:
- Rudolf Carnap
- Gottlob Frege
- George Edward Moore
- Bertrand Russell
- Moritz Schlick
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Modern Asian philosophy
Various philosophical movements in Asia arose in the modern period including:
- New Confucianism
- Maoism
- Buddhist modernism
- Kyoto school
- Neo-Vedanta
Notes
- ISBN 978-0-13-158591-1.
- ^ Brian Leiter (ed.), The Future for Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 44 n. 2.
- ^ "Niccolo Machiavelli | Biography, Books, Philosophy, & Facts". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2019-05-30.
- ^ "Western philosophy - Renaissance philosophy".
- ISBN 978-0-13-158591-1.
- ) in Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009.
- ISBN 978-0-205-11671-3.
- ^ Daniel Sommer Robinson, "Idealism", Encyclopædia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/281802/idealism
- ^ Mullarkey, John, and Beth Lord (eds.). The Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy. London, 2009, p. 309
- ^ Stewart, Jon. Kierkegaard and Existentialism. Farnham, England, 2010, p. ix
- ^ Crowell, Steven (October 2010). "Existentialism". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 2012-04-12.
- ^ Zahavi, Dan (2003), Husserl's Phenomenology, Stanford: Stanford University Press
- ^ a b Biesta, G.J.J. & Burbules, N. (2003). Pragmatism and educational research. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
- ISBN 978-1-59102-359-3. Retrieved 12 February 2011.
- ^ "Without exception, the best philosophy departments in the United States are dominated by analytic philosophy, and among the leading philosophers in the United States, all but a tiny handful would be classified as analytic philosophers. Practitioners of types of philosophizing that are not in the analytic tradition—such as phenomenology, classical pragmatism, existentialism, or Marxism—feel it necessary to define their position in relation to analytic philosophy." John Searle (2003) Contemporary Philosophy in the United States in N. Bunnin and E.P. Tsui-James (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, 2nd ed., (Blackwell, 2003), p. 1.
- ^ See, e.g., Avrum Stroll, Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 5: "[I]t is difficult to give a precise definition of 'analytic philosophy' since it is not so much a specific doctrine as a loose concatenation of approaches to problems." Also, see ibid., p. 7: "I think Sluga is right in saying 'it may be hopeless to try to determine the essence of analytic philosophy.' Nearly every proposed definition has been challenged by some scholar. [...] [W]e are dealing with a family resemblance concept."
- ^ See Hans-Johann Glock, What Is Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 205: "The answer to the title question, then, is that analytic philosophy is a tradition held together both by ties of mutual influence and by family resemblances."
- ^ Brian Leiter (2006) webpage “Analytic” and “Continental” Philosophy. Quote on the definition: "'Analytic' philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with the humanities."
- ^ H. Glock, "Was Wittgenstein an Analytic Philosopher?", Metaphilosophy, 35:4 (2004), pp. 419–444.
- ^ Colin McGinn, The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey through Twentieth-Century Philosophy (HarperCollins, 2002), p. xi.: "analytical philosophy [is] too narrow a label, since [it] is not generally a matter of taking a word or concept and analyzing it (whatever exactly that might be). [...] This tradition emphasizes clarity, rigor, argument, theory, truth. It is not a tradition that aims primarily for inspiration or consolation or ideology. Nor is it particularly concerned with 'philosophy of life,' though parts of it are. This kind of philosophy is more like science than religion, more like mathematics than poetry – though it is neither science nor mathematics."
External links
- Media related to Modern philosophy at Wikimedia Commons
- Modern philosophy at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project