We come now to the third unit in our course, which covers the modern era. Modern era extends
roughly from the 16th century to the middle of the 1800s or so. As with the other ages
I'm calling this by a specific name, I'm calling it the Age of Faith in Reason in contrast
to the medieval era, which I've called the Age of Faith and Reason. So as the name suggests,
there is a a movement away from some of the characteristic modes of thought, the characteristic
authorities and thought patterns that typified the medieval era, and a turning towards, a
a kind of rebooting towards the the idea that we can on our own steam, by our own intellectual
efforts, by starting from scratch for example and and rethinking things on our own we can
avoid the errors that we see to have inflicted philosophy, science, and religion throughout
the Middle Ages, and set philosophy, science, and religion on the right footing again. This
is particularly clear with people like René Descartes, whose work I think can't be understood
outside of the tumultuous backdrop of the of the 16th century and the 17th century.
So I want to say something that's gonna apply to Descartes's work but also to the work of
the philosophers we'll be studying such as Hobbes, such as Rosseau, such as John Locke,
Hume and and all the rest and I I wanna I wanna situate them in their historical era
so we can get a better understanding of what their main problems and concerns were and
what their new philosophical methodology looked like. So just put yourself back here during
this period in time. What do you think of when you think of the 16th century, the 1500s?
Think of everything that's going on culturally, politically, scientifically during this this
period. You've got the Protestant Reformation, which involves a casting aside or a casting
down the authority of the Roman Catholic magisterium and and instead a a desire to go back ad fontes,
to go back to the original source texts of the Christian church and then to develop their
own theology and and their own way of understanding the Christian religion in a way that just
bypasses the the authoritative teaching organ of the Roman Catholic Church. Why would they
do that? Well, the idea that some of them had was that the Roman Catholic Church had
actually led itself into error, was wrong about things of grave import and so because
of that, it had given up its its right to be considered an authority, okay. Now think
of what else is going on, not just religiously but now scientifically. You've got the scientific
revolution with people like Newton, Galileo, Copernicus coming around and demonstrating
by strict mathematical means that the way that we had viewed the world for thousands
of years turned out to be an incorrect way of viewing the world. Just as the Roman Catholic
magisterium had been allegedly wrong theologically, so too the great authorities in science, particularly
Aristotle and Ptolemy had been wrong concerning what the solar system was like. No longer
can we consider the world to be, the earth to be in the center of the solar system. Rather,
the sun occupies a central position and we we orbit around the sun just like all of the
other planets, not in perfect spheres but in elliptical, lopsided orbits. More than
that, and more importantly I think for our own self conception, is a a discounting of
Aristotle's biology and of Aristotle's physics. It's hard for us to imagine how earth-shaking
this was because I think we're we're kind of used to the idea of scientific revolutions,
new scientific discoveries and and so on, but they had basically in in the Western world,
there had basically been one way of looking at physics, of looking at biology, of looking
at the natural order, and it had been in place for thousands of years. Moreover it was a
way that was wedded to Aristotle's kind of metaphysics or his his first philosophy so
as to present a a a kind of comprehensive picture of the world, and the comprehensive
picture of the world that you get by way of Aristotle's science and by way of Aristotle's
philosophy is one in which the world is much more like a an animal, like a living thing.
It's the world is a hospitable place. Things operate according to functions or purposes.
Everything has a goal or is ordered towards an end. Aristotle's world is easy to see as
being the product of a rational and benevolent designer, and it's easy to see how rational
goal operating or goal governed individuals such as us could fit within the world, but
all of this is is changing. Aristotle's physics is being replaced now by mechanism, by the
new science, which says basically that the universe is made up of material corpuscles
and they all operate in accordance with brute mathematical laws of motion. It doesn't make
any sense to ask about the end or the goal or the purpose of a rock, of a physical particle.
It just operates according to force equals mass times acceleration, those sorts of brute
mathematical laws. Now think about the impact that that would have on the way that you view
the world and the way that you view your own place within the world. You know if if if
the world is less like an organism and more like a machine. If it doesn't run according
to teleological or goal directed principles but runs rather in accordance with brute mathematical
laws, it's harder to see it as the product of intelligence and benevolence and it's harder
to see how we fit into this scheme of things as allegedly free, morally responsible and
rational creatures. We, like the world, begin to look more and more like cogs and wheels
in a great machine governed by brute laws of nature that run in deterministic patterns.
Okay, so you've got in the modern period, a a period where all of the the scientific,
the philosophical, and religious certainties of yesteryear are less and less certain by
the day. Where do you go for certainty? What can you know for sure? If we'd been so wrong
for such a long time about so many things, how did we end up in this mess and how can
we ensure that we don't end up in a similar mess? How can we put philosophy on on the
right footing? How, finally, can we do it in such a way that we preserve what is right
and and demonstrable and good about the new mechanistic science but in a way that reconciles
it with cherished beliefs concerning the the purposefullness of the world, the freedom,
the rationality, and the distinctiveness or uniqueness of human beings? This calls for
a new philosophy to go together with the new science in a way that that that allows us
to hold on to all of the things that make our our lives meaningful and allow us to think
of ourselves as as being purposeful beings.