MODERNITY

MEANING OF MODERNITY

• "Moderna" means "new" and "now"
• Modern is a temporal orientation to 'here and now' unlike the medieval mentality
• Term relates to the concepts of time: linear progress
• Key concepts: "technological progress" and "revolution"

TYPES OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

• Rationalism
• Empiricism
• Criticism
• Idealism
• Materialism
• Positivism
• Existentialism

MAJOR THINKERS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

• Descartes
• Pascal
• Hume
• Kant
• Hegel
• Marx
• Kierkegaard

CENTRAL THEMES

• Cosmocentrism- universal/ what is X made of?
• Theocentricism- religion/ God
• Anthropocentrism- Human
• Logocentrism- logic- analytical- deconstructivism

THREE CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

• Centers on the problem of consciousness of subjectivity
• Radicalization of the epistemological concept of critique
• Teleological Concept of historical progress of mankind

DESCARTES

• Based his philosophy off of two subtances
• One was res extensia
• The other was res cogitans
• The use of these two substances in his philosophy was called Dualism.
• Descartes was about the internal only, strictly subjective

RES EXTENSIA AND RES COGITANS

• Res extensia related to time and space
• It related to things of the physical and sensory world
• Res cogitans was about knowing things and this knowledge leading to reason and the soul
• Because of the introduction of the soul, the mind and God were both introduced as well
• The human mind was res cogitans and the body was res extensia

3 TYPES OF IDEAS

• According to Descartes there are three types of ideas
• The first is innate
• The second is internal
• And the last is external
• He didn't agree with the idea of external ideas so he didn't include it in his works

DAVID HUME

• Hume was influential to Kant, Jeremy Bantham, and Charles Darwin
• He wrote three major texts
• Those texts were: "Treatise on Human Nature", "An Enquiry concerning human understanding", and "An enquiry concerning the principles of morals".

GOALS/OBJECTIVES

• He summarizes his project in its subtitle: "an attempt to introduce the experimental method into moral subjects"
• Hume's aim is to bring the scientific method to beat on the study of human nature
• Experimental method is being applied to better understand humans, morals, and human nature.

KANT

• His philosophy is known as the "critical philosophy" of Modernity
• Wrote three major texts
• Autonomy was the main theme in all of his Critique's
• His goal was to synthesize rationalism and empiricism.
• His other goal was rescuing metaphysics from a Humean approach

THREE MAJOR TEXTS

• Through his career as a philosopher, Kant wrote three major texts
• The first was his "Critique of Pure Reason", which involved Metaphysics and Epistemology
• Then there was his "Critique of Practical Reason", which involved ethics
• The third text was his "Critique of Judgement", which involved aesthetics

A PRIORI

• A priori means before the fact
• Metaphysics for Kant is concerned with a priori knowledge, or knowledge whose justification does not depend on experience
• He associates a priori knowledge with reason
• Goal of the critique is to examine whether, how, and to what extent human reason is capable of a priori knowledge

HEGEL

• His type of philosophy, Hegalianism, was a product of him being influenced by Romanticism
• His work is categorized as German Idealism, and he is called an absolute idealist
• Influence by Kant and he would influence Karl Marx

ABSOLUTE IDEALISM

• Hegel is considered the founder of absolute idealism
• Absolute idealism was created because Hegel disagreed with Kant's transcendental idealism and Berkeley's subjective idealism
• Absolute idealism describes how being is an all-inclusive whole

THE "WORLD SPIRIT"

• To the romantics, the world spirit was the deepest meaning of life
• To Hegel, world spirit (a.k.a. Weltgeist) is reason itself
• Believed that the world spirit is continuously expanding toward knowledge of itself
• The world spirit comes to know itself in three stages
• The subjective spirit (the individual), the objective spirit (family, society, state), and the absolute spirit (art, religion, and philosophy)

THE DIALECTIC PROCESS

• First someone puts forth a claim: this is called a thesis
• Then, someone else outs forth a contradictory claim: an antithesis
• A third party forms a synthesis, which accommodates the best of both POVs

BECOMING

• For Hegel, the equally important truth is that it was a tree and it will be ashes
• The whole truth is that the tree became a table and will become ashes. Thus becoming, not being, is the highest expression of reality
• We attain the fullest knowledge of a thing when we know what it was, what it is, and what it will be

TRUTH

• Truth is not an objective entity
• Truth is also not subjective in the sense that it is not "up to" the individual
• Truth is an evolving reality that develops the same way that the "world spirit" does