Modern philosophy is a branch of philosophy that originated in Western Europe in the 17th
century, and is now common worldwide.
It is not a specific doctrine or school, although there are certain assumptions common to much
of it, which helps to distinguish it from earlier philosophy.
The 17th and early 20th centuries roughly mark the beginning and the end of modern philosophy.
How much if any 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modernity may or may not have ended in the twentieth century and been replaced by postmodernity.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 "modern philosophy."
This article will focus on the history of philosophy beginning from Rene Descartes through
the early twentieth century ending in Ludwig Wittgenstein.
History of modern philosophy The major figures in philosophy of mind, epistemology,
and metaphysics during the 17th and 18th centuries are roughly divided into 2 main groups.
The "Rationalists," mostly in France and Germany, argued all knowledge must begin from certain
"innate ideas" in the mind.
Major rationalists were Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Nicolas Malebranche.
The "Empiricists," by contrast, held that knowledge must begin with sensory experience.
Major figures in this line of thought are John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume
Ethics and political philosophy are usually not subsumed under these categories, though
all these philosophers worked in ethics, in their own distinctive styles.
Other important figures in political philosophy include Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
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 that "The real is rational; the rational is real."
Hegel's work was carried in many directions by his followers and critics.
Karl Marx appropriated both Hegel's philosophy of history and the empirical ethics dominant
in Britain, transforming Hegel's ideas into a strictly materialist form, setting the grounds
for the development of a science of society.
Søren Kierkegaard dismissed all systematic philosophy as an inadequate guide to life
and meaning.
For Kierkegaard, life is meant to be lived, not a mystery to be solved.
Arthur Schopenhauer took idealism to the conclusion that the world was nothing but the futile
endless interplay of images and desires, and advocated atheism and pessimism.
Schopenhauer's ideas were taken up and transformed by Nietzsche, who seized upon their various
dismissals of the world to proclaim "God is dead" and to reject all systematic philosophy
and all striving for a fixed truth transcending the individual.
Nietzsche found in this not grounds for pessimism, but the possibility of a new kind of freedom.
19th-century British philosophy came increasingly to be dominated by strands of neo-Hegelian
thought, and as a reaction against this, figures such as Bertrand Russell and George Edward
Moore began moving in the direction of analytic philosophy, which was essentially an updating
of traditional empiricism to accommodate the new developments in logic of the German mathematician
Gottlob Frege.
Rationalism
Modern philosophy traditionally begins with René Descartes and his dictum "I think, therefore
I am".
In the early seventeenth century the bulk of philosophy was dominated by Scholasticism,
written by theologians and drawing upon Plato, Aristotle, and early Church writings.
Descartes argued that many predominant Scholastic metaphysical doctrines were meaningless or
false.
In short, he proposed to begin philosophy from scratch.
In his most important work, Meditations on First Philosophy, he attempts just this, over
six brief essays.
He tries to set aside as much as he possibly can of all his beliefs, to determine what
if anything he knows for certain.
He finds that he can doubt nearly everything: the reality of physical objects, God, his
memories, history, science, even mathematics, but he cannot doubt that he is, in fact, doubting.
He knows what he is thinking about, even if it is not true, and he knows that he is there
thinking about it.
From this basis he builds his knowledge back up again.
He finds that some of the ideas he has could not have originated from him alone, but only
from God; he proves that God exists.
He then demonstrates that God would not allow him to be systematically deceived about everything;
in essence, he vindicates ordinary methods of science and reasoning, as fallible but
not false.
Rationalists René Descartes
Baruch Spinoza Gottfried Leibniz
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge which opposes other theories of knowledge, such
as rationalism, idealism and historicism.
Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes via sensory experience as opposed to rationalism,
which asserts that knowledge comes from pure thinking.
Both empiricism and rationalism are individualist theories of knowledge, whereas historicism
is a social epistemology.
While historicism also acknowledges the role of experience, it differs from empiricism
by assuming that sensory data cannot be understood without considering the historical and cultural
circumstances in which observations are made.
Empiricism should not be mixed up with empirical research because different epistemologies
should be considered competing views on how best to do studies, and there is near consensus
among researchers that studies should be empirical.
Today empiricism should therefore be understood as one among competing ideals of getting knowledge
or how to do studies.
As such empiricism is first and foremost characterized by the ideal to let observational data "speak
for themselves", while the competing views are opposed to this ideal.
The term empiricism should thus not just be understood in relation to how this term has
been used in the history of philosophy.
It should also be constructed in a way which makes it possible to distinguish empiricism
among other epistemological positions in contemporary science and scholarship.
In other words: Empiricism as a concept has to be constructed along with other concepts,
which together make it possible to make important discriminations between different ideals underlying
contemporary science.
Empiricism is one of several competing views that predominate in the study of human knowledge,
known as epistemology.
Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception,
in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or tradition in contrast to,
for example, rationalism which relies upon reason and can incorporate innate knowledge.
Empiricists George Berkeley
David Hume John Locke
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as politics, liberty, justice, property,
rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they
are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should
protect and why, what form it should take and why, what the law is, and what duties
citizens owe to a legitimate government, if any, and when it may be legitimately overthrown—if
ever.
In a vernacular sense, the term "political philosophy" often refers to a general view,
or specific ethic, political belief or attitude, about politics that does not necessarily belong
to the technical discipline of philosophy.
Political philosophers Thomas Hobbes
John Locke Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Karl Marx Friedrich Engels
John Stuart Mill Jeremy Bentham
James Mill 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.
Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing
any mind-independent thing.
In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideas—especially beliefs and values—shape
society.
As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed
of mind or spirit.
Idealism thus rejects physicalist and dualist theories that fail to ascribe priority to
the mind.
An extreme version of this idealism can exist in the philosophical notion of solipsism.
Idealist philosophers Immanuel Kant
Johann Gottlieb Fichte Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Arthur Schopenhauer
Francis Herbert Bradley 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, existentialist 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.
Existential philosophers Søren Kierkegaard
Friedrich Nietzsche Jean-Paul Sartre
Karl Jaspers Gabriel Marcel
Martin Heidegger Phenomenology
Phenomenology is the study of the structure of experience.
It is a broad philosophical movement founded in the early years of the 20th century by
Edmund Husserl, expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen
and Munich in Germany.
The philosophy then spread to France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts
far removed from Husserl's early work.
Phenomenological philosophers Edmund Husserl
Martin Heidegger Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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.
Important positions characteristic of pragmatism include instrumentalism, radical empiricism,
verificationism, conceptual relativity, and fallibilism.
There is general consensus among pragmatists that philosophy should take the methods and
insights of modern science into account.
Charles Sanders Peirce deserves most of the credit for pragmatism, along with later twentieth
century contributors William James and John Dewey.
Pragmatist philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce
William James John Dewey
Richard Rorty Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century.
In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand, the
overwhelming majority of university philosophy departments identify themselves as "analytic"
departments.
The term generally refers to a broad philosophical tradition characterized by an emphasis on
clarity and argument and a respect for the natural sciences.
Analytic philosophers Rudolf Carnap
Gottlob Frege George Edward Moore
Bertrand Russell Moritz Schlick
Ludwig Wittgenstein Notes
External links Modern philosophy at the Indiana Philosophy
Ontology Project