Modern Philosophy

We tell you what modern philosophy is, its history and what the problem of truth consisted of. Also, the importance of rationalism and empiricism.

What is modern philosophy?

Modern philosophy is the philosophy produced during the third period in the history of philosophy. This period begins in the middle of the 16th century, with the emergence of the Renaissanceand ends in the 19th century, with Kantian thought and criticism.

The Renaissance and Humanism gave rise to the transformations that allowed the emergence of modern philosophy. Some of them were the Protestant Reformation and its importance in relation to the problem of the criterion of truth, as well as the resurgence of skepticism with Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), the inductive method of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) or the modern concept of “science”.

Modern philosophy can be thought of in relation to two major currents: empiricism and rationalism. Some of the most important philosophers of empiricism were John Locke (1632-1704), George Berkeley (1685-1753), and David Hume (1711-1776). On the part of the rationalists, René Descartes (1596-1650), considered the father of modern philosophy, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) and Christian Wolff (1679-1754) stand out.

During philosophical modernity, and in parallel with the emergence of empiricism and rationalism, there was what is known as the Illustrationan intellectual and cultural movement from which thinkers such as Voltaire (1694-1778), Montesquieu (1689-1755) or J.-J. Rousseau (1712-1778).

Finally, and in an attempt to reconcile empiricism and rationalism, criticism gave rise to the critical thought of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant's work, and especially his most important book, Critique of pure reasonmeant a radical change for philosophy at almost all its levels, especially for epistemological, metaphysical, logical and ontological studies.

Context of modern philosophy

The beginning of modern philosophy is usually located in the 16th century. However, many historians of philosophy point out that already in the 15th century, with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the arrival of Columbus in America in 1492, some necessary changes began to take shape for the new period of philosophy to emerge.

Although the 1620s are often noted as the beginning of modern activity (due to the thought of Descartes), the history of philosophy, and modern philosophy in particular, is not an island, but a series of connected events and thoughts. in the same context.

In the 15th century, Renaissance philosophy developed, distanced from the medieval worldview. Skeptical reflection appears at the same time that scholastic philosophy renews its critical vigor. The rationalist philosophy of Renaissancetogether with modern science and some advances of empiricism from the hand of Bacon, They highlight the new conception of man regarding his capabilities, his freedom and ingenuity..

This results in the idea of ​​man's autonomy from religious institutions, as well as a new conception of truth. Such is the case of modern astronomy, for example, which arises from the works of Copernicus (1473-1543), Kepler (1571-160) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642).

On the theological level, the reforms of Luther (1483-1546) and Calvin (1509-1564) laid the foundations for the free interpretation of sacred texts, which was the basis of the reformed religion as a rejection of all ecclesiastical and moral authority.

Besides, The Lutheran conception of faith, which fostered an individual and subjective conscience, transformed not only religious life, but also intellectual life, and it gave her a certain pessimism from which she could never get rid, since reason was no longer sufficient to reach the plane of the transcendent.

During this time, there was also a return to Platonic thought in Florence, promoted by Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and Pico de la Mirarla (1463-1494), the rebirth of alchemy thanks to Van Helmont (1597-1644). ) and Jacob Bóhme (1575-1624) and the flowering of the thought of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), author of Of learned ignorance, Idiot and De venatione Septientiae.

Cusano thought, in particular, allowed us to reformulate notions related to the object of reason, unit of things, and the idea that intelligence It is above reason (the intuitive above the discursive).

The freedom to think as one wanted, to be autonomous when judging reality, society, institutions, science or art, even led to the creation of what was called, in the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenmentin which the Illustration.

The Enlightenment took the idea of ​​autonomy of reason to the extremein direct antagonism with ecclesiastical tradition. Although modern philosophy is not in itself the Enlightenment, it can be thought that the Enlightenment is a part of modernity or at least one of its effects.

The problem of truth

Broadly speaking, The Protestant Reformation was what produced the intellectual crisis that allowed the opening to philosophical modernity. This occurred thanks to the fact that the criterion of truth, which until then had been in the hands of episcopal authority, was questioned. There arose, then, the need to establish a new criterion of truth (not only religious but also philosophical and scientific), a criterion that should serve to distinguish what is true from what is false and, therefore, find a truth that could be achieved by means of own.

In relation to the problem of the criterion of truth, Francis Bacon, philosopher and chancellor of England, criticized the syllogism (deductive reasoning) of the scholastic tradition. Bacon stated that the syllogism was a form of reasoning that does not provide information since one proposition is derived from another, which means that the premises may not be true.

On the other hand, he explained that the terms of the premises do not have a precise meaning, so the method can lead to many errors.

Rationalism and empiricism

The most classic part of modern philosophy is made up of two major philosophical currents: rationalism and empiricism. It is often said that René Descartes was the first modern philosopher and the father of rationalism. Although this statement has been disputed, it is undeniable that philosophical modernity, properly speaking, begins with Descartes. Rationalism, empiricism, the Enlightenment and the birth of modern sciences give the basic outline of the philosophy of the time.

Both rationalism and empiricism take the subject and, as a consequence, subjectivity as their starting point. From the rationalism of continental Europe to the empiricism cultivated in Great Britain, all thinkers assigned to one current or another took the idea of ​​the subject as their philosophical axis.

However, this does not mean that both currents are philosophies. of the subject, or in any case, two aspects of the same philosophy. Each of these currents had its own and different developments, even though, some centuries later, Both positions were speculatively synthesized by the thought of Immanuel Kant..

Another element common to both currents is their close relationship with the sciences. Both rationalist and empiricist philosophy used scientific methodologies and systems of the time.such as the mathematical method for rationalism, and the observation of factual (that is, factual) data for empiricism.

At the same time, although it is true that empiricist philosophers did not have many metaphysical interests (since this would have gone against their empirical premises), theological interest did not disappear from the time but rather changed its perspective.

Both Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza worked on the question of God and the problem of the divine in one way or another, and approached the problem from the use of reason and systematic methodology.

What unites both currents is, mainly, the fact of putting the knowing subject (the subject who knows) at the center of philosophical speculation. They differ in the way in which they think of the subject (the metaphysical and epistemological character of their position regarding what the subject is and how the subject knows is different).

This does not make them irreconcilable, but it distances them enough that a few centuries will have to pass until the arrival of Kant and subsequent philosophy for a possible (although not definitive) conciliation.

rationalism

Rationalism takes its name from the privileged use given to reason.. As a philosophical current, it is inscribed in the history of the metaphysical tradition, not as a simple continuator, but as a renewal of ancient and medieval ideas.

The one who inaugurates rationalism as a current is René Descartes. He cogito Cartesian (“I think, therefore I am”), is the starting point of all of Descartes' thought, and is also a metaphysical point of view.

Both Spinoza and Leibniz refer to this concept. Although they do not use the same technical language (they do not refer to the cogito), Yeah They talk about substance, they care about certainty, ideas, clarity and distinction..

The problems arising from the Cartesian separation of extended substance and thinking substance (the ancient problem of body and soul) were the themes of rationalist metaphysical development.

Another characteristic of rationalism was the idea of ​​the spirit of system. Rationalists thought of truth as logical coherenceusing the deductive and mathematical method, seeking unity, clarity and conceptual distinction.

Furthermore, they distanced themselves from sensible experience, since they were more deductive than observers, and they sought more exact definitions than descriptions of real phenomena.

Rationalist philosophers

Some notable rationalist philosophers were:

• Rene Descartes (1596-1650). He was a French philosopher, mathematician and physicist, considered the first modern rationalist. He laid the foundations in his work Discourse of the method and his contributions were of great influence on philosophy, mathematics and physics. One of his most famous phrases is: “I think, therefore I am.”
• Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). He was a Dutch philosopher, who stood out for proposing the relationship between reason and the passions, which he considered a type of rational affection. Your idea of passion It is related to Greek stoicism, which considers that feelings can be controlled by force of will.
• Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). He was a German philosopher, polymath and politician. He devised the concept of “monad”, the minimal metaphysical unit (what on a physical level was, then, the atom). Leibniz theorized about causality, possibility, and possible worlds.

empiricism

Empiricism was characterized by being interested in experience. This meant turning not to metaphysics but to epistemological problems, that is, of knowledge. Empiricist philosophers were not interested in the question of being but in knowing how reality could be known from experience.

The idea of ​​experience was, for empiricists, always the idea of ​​sensible experience. They considered that every idea had to be supported by sensible data, no matter what the idea or the data was. Through an analytical spirit, empiricist thinkers sought to understand the human experience of knowing and affectivity, how human beings are affected by the things of the world.

For them, the ideas were supported by sensitive data. They considered that all abstraction was a product of the imagination, which was separated from experience. They were based, then, only on the data they took from the material world.and they erased any explanation that went beyond the empirical.

The fact that there are names for entities despite their differences is something typical of language, not of ideas, concepts or experience itself.

Some of the most famous empiricists were Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume.

• John Locke (1632-1704). He was an English philosopher and doctor, considered the father of classical liberalism. Influenced by the writings of Bacon, he published the famous Essay for human understandingin 1689, as a reply to Descartes.
• David Hume (1711-1776). He was a Scottish philosopher, economist and historian. He was one of the central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment and Western thought. He postulated that every idea is derived from a sensitive impression, which is why one must always start from experience when generating knowledge.
• George Berkeley (1685-1753). He was a philosopher and bishop of Berkeley. He proposed a subjective idealism that stated that the world exists only as long as we perceive it.

The synthesis of Kantian thought

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was born in 1724 in Königsberg, Prussia. Kant is considered one of the most important philosophers of all time and is often said to be the last rationalist thinker in modern philosophy, although it is fair to think that his work is a synthesis that brings together different aspects of rationalism and empiricism alike.

The three questions that guided Kant's thinking were “what can I know?”, “what should I do?” and “what can I expect?” These three concerns resulted in three of the most important works of philosophy of all time: Critique of pure reason (1781), Critique of practical reason (1788) and Criticism of the trial (1790). In them, Kant develops most of his metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic and theological thinking.

His work Critique of pure reasonin particular, is considered a turning point in the history of Western philosophy. In it Kant investigated the structure of reason, and published a second edition in 1787, with a second prologue. The work investigates the conditions of possibility of human knowledge and unites Hume's thought with many of the rationalist premises of the time.

Kant famously said that Hume woke him up from his “dogmatic sleep.” With it, Kant meant that Hume's ideas allowed him to see that there was some reason in the two ways of doing philosophy, the rationalist-dogmatic and the empiricist.

Broadly speaking, what Kant did in Critique of pure reason was to show the structure of the way of knowing. To do this, he demonstrated that, although, as Hume anticipated, all knowledge begins with experience, this does not mean that experience is enough to give a complete result.

Kant theorized that, by knowing the world through sensitivity, we perceive a series of multiple data, located in a certain time and space, which need a series of synthesis categories (provided by understanding) to be unified in a understandable object. This cognitive process is the synthesis of modernity, and through this process Kant was able to bring rationalism into dialogue with empiricism in a harmonious way.

Kant's work is not only a sharing of the structures of rationalism and empiricism, but also an improvement. It exposes the points of agreement, but also generates a new way of understanding the metaphysical and gnoseological processes that make up the human experience in the world.

References

• Nicola Abbagnano: History of Philosophy. Translated by J. Estelrich. Barcelona: Montaner and Simón, 1955, 1956.
• J. Bennett: Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes (Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes, 1971), trans. JA Robles, Mexico: National Autonomous University of
• Mexico, 1988
• Émile Bréhier: History of philosophy (Histoire de la Philosophie, 1926) translation by Demetrio Náñez, Volume II: Modern and contemporary philosophy. Buenos Aires:
• South American, 3rd. ed., 1948.
• Ernst Cassirer: The problem of knowledge in modern philosophy and science. (Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie and Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, 1906)
• Frederick Charles Copleston: History of Philosophy (A History of Philosophy, 1958). Volumes 4, 5 and 6. Barcelona, ​​Caracas, Mexico: Ariel, 1980.
• Romero, F. (1959). History of modern philosophy (Vol. 150). Economic Culture Fund.