MODERNITY

MODERNITY IN GENERAL

• Modern can mean all of post-medieval European history, in the context of dividing history into three large epochs: Antiquity, Medieval, and Modern
• Modernity is often characterized by comparing modern societies to premodern or postmodern ones, and the understanding of those non-modern social statuses is, again, far from a settled issue.

MODERNITY CONT.

• To an extent, it is reasonable to doubt the very possibility of a descriptive concept that can adequately capture diverse realities of societies of various historical contexts, especially non-European ones, let alone a three-stage model of social evolution from premodernity to postmodernity.
• Seemingly contradictory characteristics ascribed to modernity are often different aspects of this process.

MODERNITY CONT.

• There have been two major answers to this question. First, an internal factor is that only in Europe, through the Renaissance humanists and early modern philosophers and scientists, rational thinking came to replace many intellectual activities that had been under heavy influence of convention, superstition, and religion.
• Second, an external factor is that colonization, starting as early as the Age of Discovery, created exploitative relations between European countries and their colonies.

MODERNITY CONT.

• It is also notable that such commonly-observed features of many modern societies as the nuclear family, slavery, gender roles, and nation states do not necessarily fit well with the idea of rational social organization in which components such as people are treated equally.
• may not be mere exceptions to the essential characteristics of modernization, but necessary parts of it.

MODERNITY CONT.

• Modernization brought a series of seemingly indisputable benefits to people. Lower infant mortality rate, decreased death from starvation, eradication of some of the fatal diseases, more equal treatment of people with different backgrounds and incomes.
• Environmental problems comprise another category in the dark side of modernity. Pollution is perhaps the least controversial of these, but one may include decreasing biodiversity and climate change as results of development.

DESCARTES

• We may attain sufficient knowledge of this power to perceive clearly and distinctly that God possesses it; but we cannot get sufficient grasp of it to see how it leaves the free actions of men undetermined.
• But we shall get out of these difficulties if we remember that our mind is finite, while the power of God is infinite — the power by which he not only knew from eternity whatever is or can be, but also willed it and preordained it

DESCARTES CONT.

• Now that we know that all our errors depend on the will, it may surprising that we should ever go wrong, since there is no one who wants to go wrong.
• great difference between choosing to go wrong and choosing to give one's assent in matters where, as it happens, error is to be found.

DESCARTES CONT.

• although there is in fact no one who expressly wishes to go wrong, there is scarcely anyone who does not often wish to assent to something which, though he does not know it, contains some error.
• people who do not know the right method of finding it often pass judgement on things of which they lack perception, and this is why they fall into error.

HUME

• There is no doubt that Hume's reconciliation of freedom and necessity was a great influence on most analytic and logical empiricist philosophers.
• But Hume is much more complex, as a careful reading of the Treatise and especially the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding shows. Hume did not deny causation.

HUME CONT.

• Hume turned this around and based his ideas of morality on sentiments and feelings.
• Hume's academic skepticism about logical proofs has withstood the test of time. There is nothing that can be shown to be logically true of the physical world.

KANT

• Kant's noumenal world is a variation on Plato's concept of Soul, Descartes' mental world, and the Scholastic idea of a world in which all times are present to the eye of God.
• If Kant's Critique of Pure Reason can be seen as a reaction to David Hume's skeptical attitude toward knowledge that depends on sense data, the parallel between Hume and Kant is even stronger in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason.

KANT CONT.

• Where Hume said we could not reason to knowledge of causality, for example, but could have a natural belief in causality because of our moral sentiments and feelings, so Kant claims that his Practical Reason establishes freedom in a noumenal realm whose grounding principle is morality
• In an early letter to a friend, Kant described the workings of his mind as involving chance.

KANT CONT.

• Kant's command of Newtonian physics was greater than Hume's admiration of it as a model for his human nature.
• In fact, in the question about the freedom which must be the foundation of all moral laws and the consequent responsibility.

HEGEL

• Hegel's philosophical method of dialectical idealism describes an Absolute Spirit.
• The will is free, so that freedom is both the substance of right and its goal, while the system of right is the realm of freedom made actual, the world of mind brought forth out of itself like a second nature.

HEGEL CONT.

• The will contains the element of pure indeterminacy or that pure reflection of the ego.
• unrestricted infinity of absolute abstraction or universality is the pure thought of oneself.

HEGEL CONT.

• Will of our minds creates unit in which people can relate to one another.
• The specific characteristics of the difference which the self-determining concept sets up within the will appear in the natural will as an immediately existing content.

HEGEL CONT.

• the will itself as the will of a specific individual and as a will separating itself off against another individual.
• Only in freedom of this kind is the will by itself without qualification, because then it is related to nothing except itself and so is released from every tie of dependence on anything else.

MY QUESTIONS

• How can we use modernity today?
• Which philosopher was the most correct about their information?

MY QUESTIONS CONT.

• Can people still relate to these philosophers?
• What are the main facts behind the philosophers pieces of work?

CONCLUSIONS

• I believe the most trustworthy for realism is Descartes.
• Modernity will help everyone solve their main issues to then discover their true selves.

REFERENCES

• http://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/modernit.htm
• http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/descartes/
• http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/hume/
• http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/kant/
• http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/hegel/