Lesson № 2 (seminar – 6 hours)
Тhemes:
1. Philosophy of the Middle Ages, its peculiar features.
2. Philosophy of the Renaissance period.
3. West-European philosophy of New Age and Enlightenment.
Aim: – to unfold peculiarities of Middle Ages type of philosophy and disclose the problems field of Middle Ages;
– to explain peculiarities of Renaissance transformation of Christian worldview, to point out the single line of development of philosophical schools of European Renaissance;
– to disclose peculiar features and problems field of philosophy of New Age and Enlightenment.
Professional orientation of students: – to give students the system of medical knowledge on development of chemistry in the period of Middle Ages philosophy. To enlarge the professional level of students with knowledge about Aviscena – the author of the more than 100 books on medicine;
– to disclose to students peculiarities of medical knowledge in the Renaissance period;
– to disclose to students peculiarities of medical knowledge in the period of New Age and Enlightenment epoch.
MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY
1. The character of the Medieval Philosophy
2. The main features of the Middle Age philosophy
3. The philosophers of that period
During the decline of Greco-Roman civilization, Western philosophers turned their attention from the scientific investigation of nature and the search for worldly happiness to the problem of salvation in another and better world. By the 3rd century ad, Christianity had spread to the more educated classes of the
Medieval philosophy is the philosophy in the era now known as medieval or the Middle Ages, the period roughly extending from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD to the Renaissance in the sixteenth century. Medieval philosophy, understood as a project of independent philosophical inquiry, began in
The history of medieval philosophy is traditionally divided into two main periods: the period in the Latin West following the Early Middle Ages until the twelfth century, when the works of Aristotle and Plato were preserved and cultivated and the ‘golden age’ of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the Latin West, which witnessed the culmination of the recovery of ancient philosophy, along with a reception of its Arabic commentators, and significant developments in the field of Philosophy of religion, Logic and Metaphysics.
The medieval era was disparagingly treated by the Renaissance humanists, who saw it as a barbaric ‘middle’ period between the classical age of Greek and Roman culture, and the ‘rebirth’ or renaissance of classical culture. Modern historians consider the medieval era to be one of philosophical development, although one heavily influenced by Christian theology. One of the most notable thinkers of the era, Thomas Aquinas, never considered himself a philosopher, and criticized philosophers for always “falling short of the true and proper wisdom to be found in Christian revelation”.
The problems discussed throughout this period are the relation of faith to reason, the existence and simplicity of God, the purpose of theology and metaphysics, and the problems of knowledge, of universals, and of individuation.
Medieval philosophy is characteristically theological: With the possible exceptions of Avicenna and Averroes, medieval thinkers did not consider themselves philosophers at all. Their concerns are theological: For them, the philosophers were the ancient pagan writers such as Plato and Aristotle.However, the theological works of medieval writers use the ideas and logical techniques of the ancient philosophers to address difficult theological questions, and points of doctrine. Thomas Aquinas, following Peter Damian, argued that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology (ancilla theologiae).
The three principles that underlie all their work are the use of logic, dialectic, and analysis to discover the truth, known as ratio, respect for the insights of ancient philosophers, in particular Aristotle, and deference to their authority (auctoritas), and the obligation to co-ordinate the insights of philosophy with theological teaching and revelation (concordia).
One of the most heavily debated topics of the period was that of faith versus reason. Avicenna and Averroes both leaned more on the side of reason. Augustine stated that he would never allow his philosophical investigations to go beyond the authority of God. Anselm attempted to defend against what he saw as partly an assault on faith, with an approach allowing for both faith and reason. The Augustinian solution to the faith/reason problem is to (1) believe, and then (2) seek to understand.
Augustine, Saint
I
INTRODUCTION
Augustine, Saint (354-430), greatest of the Latin Fathers and one of the most eminent Western Doctors of the Church.
Augustine was born on November 13,
II
INTELLECTUAL STRUGGLE
Inspired by the philosophical treatise Hortensius, by the Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, Augustine became an earnest seeker after truth. He considered becoming a Christian, but experimented with several philosophical systems before finally entering the church. For nine years, from 373 until 382, he adhered to Manichaeism, a Persian dualistic philosophy then widely current in the
About 383 Augustine left
III
BISHOP AND THEOLOGIAN
He returned to
Augustine’s doctrine stood between the extremes of Pelagianism and Manichaeism. Against Pelagian doctrine, he held that human spiritual disobedience had resulted in a state of sin that humaature was powerless to change. In his theology, men and women are saved by the gift of divine grace; against Manichaeism he vigorously defended the place of free will in cooperation with grace. Augustine died at Hippo, August 28, 430. His feast day is August 28.
IV
WORKS
The place of prominence held by Augustine among the Fathers and Doctors of the Church is comparable to that of
Augustinian Philosophy
The process of reconciling the Greek emphasis on reason with the emphasis on religious emotion in the teachings of Christ and the apostles found eloquent expression in the writings of
The Platonic philosophy was combined with the Christian concept of a personal God who created the world and predestined (determined in advance) its course, and with the doctrine of the fall of humanity, requiring the divine incarnation in Christ. Augustine attempted to provide rational understanding of the relation between divine predestination and human freedom, the existence of evil in a world created by a perfect and all-powerful God, and the nature of the Trinity. Late in his life Augustine came to a pessimistic view about original sin, grace, and predestination: the ultimate fates of humans, he decided, are predetermined by God in the sense that some people are granted divine grace to enter heaven and others are not, and human actions and choices cannot explain the fates of individuals. This view was influential throughout the Middle Ages and became even more important during the Reformation of the 16th century when it inspired the doctrine of predestination put forth by Protestant theologian John Calvin.
Augustine conceived of history as a dramatic struggle between the good in humanity, as expressed in loyalty to the “city of
The only major contribution to Western philosophy in the three centuries following the death of Augustine in ad 430 was made by the 6th-century Roman statesman Boethius, who revived interest in Greek and Roman philosophy, particularly Aristotle’s logic and metaphysics. In the 9th century the Irish monk John Erigena developed a pantheistic interpretation of Christianity, identifying the divine Trinity with the One, Logos, and World Soul of Neoplatonism and maintaining that both faith and reason are necessary to achieve the ecstatic union with God.
Even more significant for the development of Western philosophy was the early 11th-century Muslim philosopher Avicenna. His work modifying Aristotelian metaphysics introduced a distinction important to later philosophy between essence (the fundamental qualities that make a thing what it is—the treeness of a tree, for example) and existence (being, or living reality). He also demonstrated how it is possible to combine the biblical view of God with Aristotle’s philosophical system. Avicenna’s writings on logic, mathematics, physics, and medicine remained influential for centuries.
Scholasticism
I
INTRODUCTION
Scholasticism, philosophic and theological movement that attempted to use natural human reason, in particular, the philosophy and science of Aristotle, to understand the supernatural content of Christian revelation. It was dominant in the medieval Christian schools and universities of
II
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERISTICS
Scholastic thinkers held a wide variety of doctrines in both philosophy and theology. What gives unity to the whole Scholastic movement are the common aims, attitudes, and methods generally accepted by all its members. The chief concern of the Scholastics was not to discover new facts but to integrate the knowledge already acquired separately by Greek reasoning and Christian revelation. This concern is one of the most characteristic differences between Scholasticism and modern thought since the Renaissance.
The basic aim of the Scholastics determined certain common attitudes, the most important of which was their conviction of the fundamental harmony between reason and revelation. The Scholastics maintained that because the same God was the source of both types of knowledge and truth was one of his chief attributes, he could not contradict himself in these two ways of speaking. Any apparent opposition between revelation and reason could be traced either to an incorrect use of reason or to an inaccurate interpretation of the words of revelation. Because the Scholastics believed that revelation was the direct teaching of God, it possessed for them a higher degree of truth and certitude than did natural reason. In apparent conflicts between religious faith and philosophic reasoning, faith was thus always the supreme arbiter; the theologian’s decision overruled that of the philosopher. After the early 13th century, Scholastic thought emphasized more the independence of philosophy within its own domain. Nonetheless, throughout the Scholastic period, philosophy was called the servant of theology, not only because the truth of philosophy was subordinated to that of theology, but also because the theologian used philosophy to understand and explain revelation.
This attitude of Scholasticism stands in sharp contrast to the so-called double-truth theory of the Spanish-Arab philosopher and physician Averroës. His theory assumed that truth was accessible to both philosophy and Islamic theology but that only philosophy could attain it perfectly. The so-called truths of theology served, hence, as imperfect imaginative expressions for the common people of the authentic truth accessible only to philosophy. Averroës maintained that philosophic truth could even contradict, at least verbally, the teachings of Islamic theology.
As a result of their belief in the harmony between faith and reason, the Scholastics attempted to determine the precise scope and competence of each of these faculties. Many early Scholastics, such as the Italian ecclesiastic and philosopher St. Anselm, did not clearly distinguish the two and were overconfident that reason could prove certain doctrines of revelation. Later, at the height of the mature period of Scholasticism, the Italian theologian and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas worked out a balance between reason and revelation. Scholastics after Aquinas, however, beginning with the Scottish theologian and philosopher John Duns Scotus, restricted more and more the domain of truths capable of being proved by reason and insisted that many doctrines previously thought to have been proved by philosophy had to be accepted on the basis of faith alone. One reason for this restriction was that Scholastics applied the requirements for scientific demonstration, as first specified in Aristotle’s Organon, much more rigorously than previous philosophers had done. These requirements were so strict that Aristotle himself was rarely able to apply them fully beyond the realm of mathematics. It was this trend that led finally to the loss of confidence iatural human reason and philosophy that is characteristic of the early Renaissance and of the first Protestant religious reformers, such as Martin Luther.
Another common attitude among Scholastics was their great respect for the so-called authorities in both philosophy and theology. These authorities were the great philosophers of
The Scholastics considered Aristotle the chief authority in philosophy, calling him simply the Philosopher. The early Christian prelate and theologian
III
COMMON METHODS
One of the principal methods of Scholasticism was the use of the logic and philosophic vocabulary of Aristotle in teaching, demonstration, and discussion. Another important method was the practice of teaching a text by means of a commentary by some accepted authority. In philosophy, this authority was usually Aristotle. In theology, the principal texts were the Bible and the Sententiarum Libri Quatuor (Four Books of Sentences) by the 12th-century Italian theologian and prelate Peter Lombard, a collection of the opinions of the early Fathers of the Church on problems of theology. The early Scholastics began by adhering closely to the text on which they were commenting. Gradually, as the practice of critical reading developed their own powers of thinking, they began to introduce many supplementary commentaries on points, known as disputed questions, which either were not covered or were not adequately solved by the text itself. Beginning in the 13th century these supplementary commentaries, embodying the personal thought of the teachers, became the largest and most important part of the commentaries, with the result that literal explanation of the text was reduced to a mere fraction of each commentary.
Closely allied with the commentaries on disputed questions was the technique of discussion by means of public disputation. Every professor in a medieval university was required to appear several times a year before the assembled faculty and students in a disputation, defending crucial points of his own teaching against all persons who challenged them. The forms of Aristotelian logic were employed in both defense and attack. In the 13th century the public disputation became a flexible educational tool for stimulating, testing, and communicating the progress of thought in philosophy and theology. After the middle of the 14th century, however, the vitality of public disputation declined, and it became a rigid formalism. Disputants became concerned less with real content and more with fine points of logic and minute subtleties of thought. This degraded form of disputation did much to give Scholasticism a bad reputation during the Renaissance and later; consequently, many modern thinkers have considered it mere pedantic logical formalism.
IV
PRINCIPAL SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHERS
The outstanding Scholastics of the 11th and 12th centuries included Anselm, the French philosopher, theologian, and teacher of logic Peter Abelard, and the philosopher and clergyman Roscelin, who founded the school of philosophy known as nominalism. Among Jewish thinkers of the same period, the rabbi, philosopher, and physician Maimonides attempted to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with divine revelation, as understood in Judaism, in a spirit similar to that of the Christian Scholastics. The Scholastics of the so-called golden age of the 13th century included Aquinas and the German philosopher St. Albertus Magnus, both of the Dominican order; the English monk and philosopher Roger Bacon, the Italian prelate and theologian St. Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus, all of the Franciscan order; and the Belgian secular priest Henry of Ghent (1217?-1293). Nominalism became the dominant school of philosophy in the 14th century, when Scholasticism began to decline. The most important nominalist was the English philosopher William of Ockham, a great logician who attacked all the philosophic systems of the preceding Scholastics and maintained that natural reason and philosophy had a much more restricted field of operation than his predecessors had held to be the case.
A brilliant but brief revival of Scholasticism, especially in the field of theology, took place in
In the 11th century a revival of philosophical thought began as a result of the increasing contact between different parts of the Western world and the general reawakening of cultural interests that culminated in the Renaissance. The works of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek thinkers were translated by Arab scholars and brought to the attention of philosophers in
Scholastic thought was less interested in discovering new facts and principles than in demonstrating the truth of existing beliefs. Its method was therefore dialectical (based upon logical argument), and its intense concern with the logic of argument led to important developments in logic as well as theology. The Scholastic philosopher Saint Anselm of
The contrary view, known as nominalism, was formulated by the Scholastic philosopher Roscelin, who maintained that only individual, solid objects exist and that the universals, forms, and ideas, under which particular things are classified, constitute mere sounds or names, rather than intangible substances. When he argued that the Trinity must consist of three separate beings, his views were deemed heretical and he was forced to recant in 1092. The French Scholastic theologian Peter Abelard, whose tragic love affair with Héloïse in the 12th century is one of the most memorable romantic stories in medieval history, proposed a compromise between realism and nominalism known as conceptualism, according to which universals exist in particular things as properties and outside of things as concepts in the mind. Abelard maintained that revealed religion—religion based on divine revelation, or the word of God—must be justified by reason. He developed an ethics based on personal conscience that anticipated Protestant thought.
The Spanish-Arab jurist and physician Averroës, the most noted Muslim philosopher of the Middle Ages, made Aristotelian science and philosophy a powerful influence on medieval thought with his lucid and scholarly commentaries on the works of Aristotle. He earned himself the title “the Commentator” among the many Scholastics who came to regard Aristotle as “the Philosopher.” Averroës attempted to overcome the contradictions between Aristotelian philosophy and revealed religion by distinguishing between two separate systems of truth, a scientific body of truths based on reason and a religious body of truths based on revelation. His view that reason takes precedence over religion led to his exile in 1195. Averroës’s so-called double-truth doctrine influenced many Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosophers; it was rejected, however, by many others, and became an important issue in medieval philosophy.
The Jewish rabbi and physician Moses Maimonides, one of the greatest figures in Judaic thought, followed his contemporary Averroës in uniting Aristotelian science with religion but rejected the view that both of two conflicting systems of ideas can be true. In his Guide for the Perplexed (1190?) Maimonides attempted to provide a rational explanation of Judaic doctrine and defended religious beliefs (such as the belief in the creation of the world) that conflicted with Aristotelian science only when he was convinced that decisive evidence was lacking on either side.
Abelard, Averroës, and Maimonides were each accused of blasphemy because their views conflicted with religious beliefs of the time. The 13th century, however, saw a series of philosophers who would come to be worshiped as saints. The Italian Scholastic philosopher Saint Bonaventure combined Platonic and Aristotelian principles and introduced the concept of substantial form, or nonmaterial substance, to account for the immortality of the soul. Bonaventure’s view tended toward pantheistic mysticism in making the aim of philosophy the ecstatic union with God.
The 13th-century German Scholastic philosopher Saint Albertus Magnus was the first Christian philosopher to endorse and interpret the entire system of Aristotelian thought. He studied and admired the writings of the Muslim and Jewish Aristotelians and wrote commentaries on Aristotle in which he attempted to reconcile Aristotle’s thought with Christian teachings. He also took a great interest in the natural science of his day. The 13th-century English monk Roger Bacon, one of the first Scholastics to take an interest in experimental science, realized that a great deal remained to be learned about nature. He criticized the deductive method of his contemporaries and their reliance on past authority, and called for a new method of inquiry based on controlled observation (see Deduction).
The most important medieval philosopher was Saint Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican monk who was born in
Aquinas made many important investigations into the philosophy of religion, including an extremely influential study of the attributes of God, such as omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, and benevolence. He also provided a new account of the relationship between faith and reason, arguing against the Averroists that the truths of faith and the truths of reason cannot conflict but rather apply to different realms. The truths of natural science and philosophy are discovered by reasoning from facts of experience, whereas the tenets of revealed religion, the doctrine of the Trinity, the creation of the world, and other articles of Christian dogma are beyond rational comprehension, although not inconsistent with reason, and must be accepted on faith. The metaphysics, theory of knowledge, ethics, and politics of Aquinas were derived mainly from Aristotle, but he added the Augustinian virtues of faith, hope, and charity and the goal of eternal salvation through grace to Aristotle’s naturalistic ethics with its goal of worldly happiness.
Aquinas,
I
INTRODUCTION
Aquinas,
Aquinas was born of a noble family in Roccasecca, near Aquino, and was educated at the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino and at the
II
EARLY YEARS
Aquinas was ordained a priest about 1250, and he began to teach at the
In 1256 Aquinas was awarded a doctorate in theology and appointed professor of philosophy at the
III
STUDY OF ARISTOTLE AND THE AVERROISTS
To understand the crucial importance of this controversy for Western thought, it is necessary to consider the context in which it occurred. Before the time of Aquinas, Western thought had been dominated by the philosophy of
Averroism threatened the integrity and supremacy of Roman Catholic doctrine and filled orthodox thinkers with alarm. To ignore Aristotle, as interpreted by the Averroists, was impossible; to condemn his teachings was ineffectual. He had to be reckoned with. Albertus Magnus and other scholars had attempted to deal with Averroism, but with little success. Aquinas succeeded brilliantly.
Reconciling the Augustinian emphasis upon the human spiritual principle with the Averroist claim of autonomy for knowledge derived from the senses, Aquinas insisted that the truths of faith and those of sense experience, as presented by Aristotle, are fully compatible and complementary. Some truths, such as that of the mystery of the incarnation, can be known only through revelation, and others, such as that of the composition of material things, only through experience; still others, such as that of the existence of God, are known through both equally. All knowledge, Aquinas held, originates in sensation, but sense data can be made intelligible only by the action of the intellect, which elevates thought toward the apprehension of such immaterial realities as the human soul, the angels, and God. To reach understanding of the highest truths, those with which religion is concerned, the aid of revelation is needed. Aquinas’s moderate realism placed the universals firmly in the mind, in opposition to extreme realism, which posited their independence of human thought. He admitted a foundation for universals in existing things, however, in opposition to nominalism and conceptualism.
IV
LATER YEARS
Aquinas first suggested his mature position in the treatise De Unitate Intellectus Contra Averroistas (1270), which has been translated into English as The Trinity and the Unicity of the Intellect (1946). This work turned the tide against his opponents, who were condemned by the church.
Aquinas left
Aquinas was canonized by Pope John XXII in 1323 and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius V in 1567.
V
ASSESSMENT
More successfully than any other theologian or philosopher, Aquinas organized the knowledge of his time in the service of his faith. In his effort to reconcile faith with intellect, he created a philosophical synthesis of the works and teachings of Aristotle and other classic sages; of Augustine and other church fathers; of Averroës, Avicenna, and other Islamic scholars; of Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides and Solomon ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol; and of his predecessors in the Scholastic tradition. This synthesis he brought into line with the Bible and Roman Catholic doctrine.
Aquinas’s accomplishment was immense; his work marks one of the few great culminations in the history of philosophy. After Aquinas, Western philosophers could choose only between humbly following him and striking off in some altogether different direction. In the centuries immediately following his death, the dominant tendency, even among Roman Catholic thinkers, was to adopt the second alternative. Interest in Thomist philosophy began to revive, however, toward the end of the 19th century. In the encyclical Aeterni Patris (Of the Eternal Father, 1879), Pope Leo XIII recommended that
Medieval Philosophy After Aquinas
The most important critics of Thomistic philosophy (adherence to the theories of Aquinas) were the 13th-century Scottish theologian John Duns Scotus and 14th-century English Scholastic William of Ockham. Duns Scotus developed a subtle and highly technical system of logic and metaphysics, but because of the fanaticism of his followers the name Duns later ironically became a symbol of stupidity in the English word dunce. Scotus rejected the attempt of Aquinas to reconcile rational philosophy with revealed religion. He maintained, in a modified version of the double-truth doctrine of Averroës, that all religious beliefs are matters of faith, except for the belief in the existence of God, which he regarded as logically provable. Against the view of Aquinas that God acts in accordance with his rational nature, Scotus argued that the divine will is prior to the divine intellect and creates, rather than follows, the laws of nature and morality, thus implying a stronger notion of free will than that of Aquinas. On the issue of universals, Scotus developed a new compromise between realism and nominalism, accounting for the difference between individual objects and the forms that these objects exemplify as a logical rather than a real distinction.
William of Ockham formulated the most radically nominalistic criticism of the Scholastic belief in intangible, invisible things such as forms, essences, and universals. He maintained that such abstract entities are merely references of words to other words rather than to actual things. His famous rule, known as Ockham’s razor—which said that one should not assume the existence of more things than are logically necessary—became a fundamental principle of modern science and philosophy.
References
1. http://www.answers.com/topic/philosophy#ixzz2ggPxbwQP
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
3. Copleston F. С. History of Philosophy, 8 vol.
4. Edwards, Paul, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vol.
5. Aquinas, Thomas; Mary T.
6. Aquinas, Thomas (2002). Aquinas’s Shorter Summa.
7. Davies, Brian (2004). Aquinas: An Introduction. Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 0-8264-7095-5.
8. Davies, Brian (1993). The Thought of Thomas Aquinas.
9. Russell, Bertrand (1967), A History of Western Philosophy, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0671201581
10. Geisler, Norman, ed. (1999). Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics.
11. Gordon, Barry (1987 [2009]). “Aquinas,
12. Hampden, Renn Dickson (1848). “The Life of Thomas Aquinas: A Dissertation of the Scholastic Philosophy of the Middle Ages”. Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. London: John J. Griffin & Co.
13. Healy, Nicholas M. (2003). Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life. Ashgate Publishing Ltd. ISBN 0-7546-1472-7.
14. Hyman, J.; and Walsh, J. J., eds. (1973). Philosophy in the Middle Ages. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. ISBN 0-915144-05-0.
15. Schoedinger, Andrew B., ed. (1996).
16. Brown, Peter (2000) Augustine of Hippo: A Biography,
Weiskotten, Herbert T. (2008). The Life of
RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY
1. Characteristic features of Renaissance. Humanism and anthropocentrism.
2. Ideology of Reformation.
3. Natural philosophy and philosophy of natural studies.
The Renaissance (from French: Renaissance “re-birth”, Italian: Rinascimento, from rinascere “to be reborn”) was a cultural movement that spanned the period roughly from the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. Though availability of paper and the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across
As a cultural movement, it encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch, the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting, and gradual but widespread educational reform.
In politics, the Renaissance contributed the development of the conventions of diplomacy, and in science an increased reliance on observation. Historians often argue this intellectual transformation was a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Modern era. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term “Renaissance man“.
There is a consensus that the Renaissance began in Florence, Italy, in the 14th century.Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time; its political structure; the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici; and the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy following the Conquest of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.
The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and in line with general scepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the “Renaissance” and individual culture heroes as “Renaissance men”, questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation. The art historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of Renaissance
It is perhaps no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization— historians of economic and social developments, political and religious situations, and, most particularly, natural science— but only exceptionally by students of literature and hardly ever by historians of Art.
Some have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural “advance” from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for the classical age,while social and economic historians of the longue durée especially have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, linked, as Panofsky himself observed, “by a thousand ties”.
The word Renaissance, whose literal translation from French into English is “Rebirth”, was first used and defined by French historian Jules Michelet in his 1855 work, Histoire de France. The word Renaissance has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century.
In the 15th and 16th centuries a revival of scientific interest iature was accompanied by a tendency toward pantheistic mysticism—that is, finding God in all things. The Roman Catholic prelate Nicholas of Cusa anticipated the work of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in his suggestion that the Earth moved around the Sun, thus displacing humanity from the center of the universe; he also conceived of the universe as infinite and identical with God. The Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who similarly identified the universe with God, developed the philosophical implications of the Copernican theory. Bruno’s philosophy influenced subsequent intellectual forces that led to the rise of modern science and to the Reformation.
Renaissance philosophy was the period of the history of philosophy in
As with all periods, there is a wide drift of dates, reasons for categorization and boundaries. In particular, the Renaissance, more than later periods, is thought to begin in
Francesco Petrarca (July 20, 1304 – July 19, 1374), known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest Renaissance humanists. Petrarch is often called the “Father of Humanism“.[1] Based on Petrarch’s works, as well as those of Giovanni Boccaccio and above all Dante Alighieri, Pietro Bembo in the 16th century created the model for the modern Italian language, later endorsed by the Accademia della Crusca. His sonnets were admired and imitated throughout
Petrarch is best known for his Italian poetry, notably the Canzoniere and the Trionfi (“Triumphs”). However, Petrarch was an enthusiastic Latin scholar and did most of his writing in this language. His Latin writings include scholarly works, introspective essays, letters, and more poetry. Among them are Secretum (“My Secret Book”), an intensely personal, guilt-ridden imaginary dialogue with Augustine of Hippo; De Viris Illustribus (“On Famous Men”), a series of moral biographies; Rerum Memorandarum Libri, an incomplete treatise on the cardinal virtues; De Otio Religiosorum (“On Religious Leisure”) and De Vita Solitaria (“On the Solitary Life”), which praise the contemplative life; De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae (“Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul”), a self-help book which remained popular for hundreds of years; Itinerarium (“Petrarch’s Guide to the Holy Land”), a distant ancestor of Fodor’s and Lonely Planet; a number of invectives against opponents such as doctors, scholastics, and the French; the Carmen Bucolicum, a collection of 12 pastoral poems; and the unfinished epic Africa. Petrarch also published many volumes of his letters, including a few written to his long-dead friends from history such as Cicero and Virgil. Cicero, Virgil, and Seneca were his literary models. Most of his Latin writings are difficult to find today. However, several of his works are scheduled to appear in the Harvard University Press series I Tatti . It is difficult to assign any precise dates to his writings because he tended to revise them throughout his life.
Petrarch is traditionally called the father of Humanism and considered by many to be the “father of the Renaissance.” He was the first to offer a combination of abstract entities of classical culture and Christian philosophy. In his work Secretum meum he points out that secular achievements didn’t necessarily preclude an authentic relationship with God. Petrarch argued instead that God had given humans their vast intellectual and creative potential to be used to their fullest.[24] He inspired humanist philosophy which led to the intellectual flowering of the Renaissance. He believed in the immense moral and practical value of the study of ancient history and literature – that is, the study of human thought and action. Petrarch was a devout Catholic and did not see a conflict between realizing humanity’s potential and having religious faith. A highly introspective man, he shaped the nascent humanist movement a great deal because many of the internal conflicts and musings expressed in his writings were seized upon by Renaissance humanist philosophers and argued continually for the next 200 years. For example, Petrarch struggled with the proper relation between the active and contemplative life, and tended to emphasize the importance of solitude and study. Later the politician and thinker Leonardo Bruni argued for the active life, or “civic humanism.” As a result, a number of political, military, and religious leaders during the Renaissance were inculcated with the notion that their pursuit of personal glory should be grounded in classical example and philosophical contemplation.
Renaissance philosophy was the period of the history of philosophy in
Renaissance humanism was a movement that affected the cultural, political, social, and literary landscape of
Humanism’s divergence from orthodox Christianity can be identified with the condemnation of Pelagianism by Jerome and Augustine. Like the Humanists, Pelagius perceived humans as possessing inherent capacity for developing the qualities that the church perceived as necessitating the gift of grace from God. Pelagius rejected the doctrine of original sin. The Humanists likewise recognize humans as borot with a burden of inherited sin due to their ancestry but with potential for both good and evil which will develop in this life as their characters are formed. The Humanists therefore reject Calvinistic predestination, and understandably therefore arouse the hostility of Protestant fundamentalists.
Renaissance humanists believed that the liberal arts (music, art, grammar, rhetoric, oratory, history, poetry, using classical texts, and the studies of all of the above) should be practiced by all levels of wealth. They also approved of self, human worth and individual dignity.
Noteworthy humanist scholars from this period include the Dutch theologian Erasmus, the English author (and Roman Catholic saint) Thomas More, the French writer François Rabelais, the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch and the Italian scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
In astronomy, heliocentrism is the theory that the Sun is at the center of the Solar System. The word came from the Greek ( Helios = sun= center). Historically, heliocentrism was opposed to geocentrism, which placed the earth at the center. (The distinction between the Solar System and the Universe was not clear until modern times, but extremely important relative to the controversy over cosmology and religion.) Although a number of early cosmologists such as Aristarchus speculated about the motion of the Earth around a stationary Sun, most of them refrained themselves from speaking out out of the fear for imprisonments and even execution based on claims of blasphemy and other charges from the Church at the time. It was not until the 16th century with sacrifices of scientists such as Giordano Bruno and the Polish mathematician and astronomer Copernicus presented a fully predictive mathematical model of a heliocentric system, which was later elaborated and expanded by Kepler and defended by Galileo, becoming the center of a major dispute.
The City of the Sun is a philosophical work by the Italian Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella. It is an important early utopian work. The City of the Sun is presented as a dialogue between “a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain”. Inspired by Plato’s Republic and the description of Atlantis inTimaeus, it describes a theocratic society where goods, women and children are held in common. It also resembles the City of
Arise, O Lord, and judge Thy cause. A wild boar has invaded Thy vineyard. Arise, O Peter, and consider the case of the Holy Roman Church, the mother of all churches, consecrated by thy blood. Arise, O Paul, who by thy teaching and death hast illumined and dost illumine the Church. Arise all ye saints, and the whole universal Church, whose interpretations of Scripture has been assailed. (papal bull of Pope Leo X, 1520)
It truly seems to me that if this fury of the Romanists should continue, there is no remedy except that the emperor, kings, and princes, girded with force and arms, should resolve to attack this plague of all the earth no longer with words but with the sword. . . . If we punish thieves with the gallows, robbers with the sword, and heretics with fire, why do we not all the more fling ourselves with all our weapons upon these masters of perdition, these cardinals, these popes, and all this sink of Roman sodomy that ceaselessly corrupts the church of God and wash our hands in their blood so that we may free ourselves and all who belong to us from this most dangerous fire?(Martin Luther, 1521)
Young people have lost that deference to their elders on which the social order depends; they reject all correction. Sexual offenses, rapes, adulteries, incests and seductions are more common than ever before. How monstrous that the world should have been overthrown by such dense clouds for the last three or four centuries, so that it could not see clearly how to obey Christ’s commandment to love our enemies. Everything is in shameful confusion; everywhere I see only cruelty, plots, frauds, violence, injustice, shamelessness while the poor groan under the oppression and the innocent are arrogantly and outrageously harassed. God must be asleep. (John Calvin)
The 16th century in
But the 16th century was more than just the story of the Renaissance. The century witnessed the growth of royal power, the appearance of centralized monarchies and the discovery of new lands. During the great age of exploration, massive quantities of gold and silver flood
We have to ask why something like the Reformation took place when it did. In general, dissatisfaction with the Church could be found at all levels of European society. First, it can be said that many devout Christians were finding the Church’s growing emphasis on rituals unhelpful in their quest for personal salvation. Indeed, what we are witnessing is the shift from salvation of whole groups of people, to something more personal and individual. The sacraments had become forms of ritualized behavior that no longer “spoke” to the people of
These abuses called for two major responses. On the one hand, there was a general tendency toward anti-clericalism, that is, a general but distinct distrust and dislike of the clergy. Some people began to argue that the layperson was just as good as the priest, an argument already advanced by the Waldensians of the 12th century. On the other hand, there were calls for reform. These two responses created fertile ground for conflict of all kinds, and that conflict would be both personal and social.
The deepest source of conflict was personal and spiritual. The Church had grown more formal in its organization, which is hardly unsurprising since it was now sixteen centuries old. The Church had its own elaborate canon law as well as a dogmatic theology. All of this had been created at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. That Council also established the importance of the sacraments as well as the role of the priest in administering the sacraments. 1215 also marks the year that the Church further elaborated its position on Purgatory. Above all, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 established the important doctrine that salvation could only be won through good works — fasting, chastity, abstinence and asceticism.
The common people, meanwhile, sought a more personal, spiritual and immediate kind of religion — something that would touch them directly, in the heart. The rituals of the Church now meant very little to them — they needed some kind of guarantee that they were doing the right thing – that they would indeed be saved. The Church gave little thought to reforming itself. People yearned for something more while the Church seemed to promise less. What seemed to be needed was a general reform of Christianity itself. Only such a major transformation would effect the changes reflected in the spiritual desires of the people.
Throughout the 14th and 15th centuries the Church was faced with numerous direct challenges.
· Heretics had been assaulting the Church since the 12th century. The heretics were Christians who deviated from Christian dogma. Many did not believe in Christian baptism — the majority felt left out of the Church.
· There were also numerous mystics who desired a direct and emotional divine illumination. They claimed they had been illuminated by an inner light that assured them of salvation.
· There was an influential philosophical movement called nominalism that stressed the reality of anything concrete and real, thus doubting faith.
· Renaissance humanism rejected the Christian matrix almost completely and instead turned to the Classical World, the true source of virtue and wisdom.
· The breakdown of feudalism and the discovery and exploitation of the
· The Church was also challenged by an increasing awareness of ethnicity and nationalism, e.g. Joan of Arc and the 100 Years’ War.
· Merchants and skilled workers living in cities were growing wealthy and influential as they began to supply
· European kings consolidated their power over their nobility.
· There was an awareness, thanks to the age of discovery, that there was a pagan world outside the world of
The Reformation was dominated by the figure of MARTIN LUTHER (1483-1546). Luther was the son of Hans Luther, a copper miner from the district of Saxony. Hans was a self-made man. As a youth he worked menial jobs in copper mines — but by the time Martin was born at Eisleben, he had risen to prominence and owned several mines. Hans Luther wanted his son to do even more with his life so while Martin was in his teens, it was decided that he would study law. So, after his preliminary education was complete, at the age of 17 young Martin Luther entered the
But at this point, Luther rejected the world. He was twenty-one at the time. In 1505, Luther tells us that he experienced the “first great event” of his life. In that year he experienced some kind of conversion after having been struck by a bolt of lightning. He cried out, “Help, St. Anne, I will become a monk.” He was struck by the hand of God and felt that God was in everything. He felt doubt within himself – he simply could not reconcile his faith with his worldly ambitions. And so, Luther was plagued by an overwhelming sense of guilt, fear and terror. To relieve his anxiety he joined the Order of the Hermits of St. Augustine. There he would be shielded from worldly distractions. There he would find the true path to heaven. He fasted, prayed and scourged himself relentlessly. But he still felt doubts. One day, as he sat in his cell, he through his Bible on the table and pointed at a passage at random. The passage was from the Epistles of St. Paul: “For the justice of God is revealed from faith to faith in that it is written, for the just shall live by faith.” (Romans 1:17)
By 1508, Luther had been and was transferred from the monastery at
In 1512, he returned to
The storm broke on October 31, the eve of All Saints Day. On that day Luther nailed a copy of the NINETY-FIVE THESES to the door of the
The particular indulgence which attracted Luther’s attention was being sold throughout
Luther also attacked indulgences in general, and he voiced his objections to the sale of indulgences in his LETTER to the Archbishop of Mainz in 1517. According to the Church, indulgences took their existence from the surplus grace that had accumulated through the lives of Christ, the saints and martyrs. The purchase of an indulgence put the buyer in touch with this grace and freed him from the earthly penance of a particular sin, but not the sin itself. But Tetzel’s sales pitch implied that the buyer was freed from the sin as well as the penance attached to it. Tetzel also sold people on the idea that an indulgence could be purchased for a relative in Purgatory – this meant the relative’s soul would now fly to Heaven. For Tetzel: “As soon as pennies in the money chest ring, the souls out of their Purgatory do spring.” Luther answered (Theses 28) in the following way: “It is certain that when the money rattles in the chest, avarice and gain may be increased, but the Suffrage of the Church depends on the will of God alone.”
Luther claimed that it was not only Tetzel but the papacy itself which spread the false doctrine of the indulgence. By attacking the issue of the indulgences, Luther was really attacking the entire theology and structure of the Church. By making salvation dependent on the individual’s faith, Luther abolished the need for sacraments as well as a clergy to administer them. For Luther, faith alone, without the necessity of good works, would bring salvation. This was obviously heretical thinking. Of course, Luther couched his notion of “justification by faith alone” within a scheme of predestination. That is, only God knows who will be saved and will be damned. Good works did not guarantee salvation. Faith did not guarantee salvation. God alone grants salvation or damnation.
This discussion all begs the question: why did people follow Luther? It is simply amazing that within a relatively brief period of time, that so many people turned their back on the Roman Church, and followed Luther. For the wealthy, becoming a Lutheran was one way to keep their wealth yet still be given a chance for salvation without paying homage to Rome. In other words, it can be said that the wealthy followed Luther as a form of protest against the Church. For the very poor, Luther offered individual dignity and respect. Not good works or servitude to
JOHN CALVIN (1509-1564) represents the second wave of the Protestant Reformation. Although Luther and Calvin were more less contemporaries of one another, Calvin was an entirely different man. John Calvin acquired his early education in
On All Saints Day in 1533, Calvin delivered an address at
Calvin came to
Calvin urged — actually forced — all citizens of
Of course, foundation of Calvinism was clearly the doctrine of predestination, that is, the idea that all of mankind is assigned to either Heaven or Hell at birth. There is nothing you can do that would change or destiny since it was an hands of all-powerful God. Such an opinion logically leads to anxiety — after all, no one knew just what to do. While Calvin would not argue, as did the Church, that good works were one needed to go to Heaven, he did admit that good works served a purpose. Good works, then, became a divine sign, a sign that the individual was making the best of their life here on earth. It was, however, still no guarantee.
Calvin also introduced his concept of the “calling.” Some men and women seemed ill-fitted for life on earth. They were avaricious, slothful, amoral. However, there were others who seemed to work happily in their lifetime, accomplishing much and in the right spirit. In other words, they had been “called” to do a certain thing here on earth.
Of course, we wake up early, work at your calling, are thrifty, sober and abstain from frivolity, there is an unintended consequence. That consequence was the acquisition of wealth. So, while Calvin did not invent free enterprise, nor did he invent capitalism, or the desire for wealth, he did rationalize that desire by arguing that certain men are imbued with the spirit of acquisition, the correct spirit. That spirit has often been called the Protestant Work Ethic. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) asked why it is that the world’s most wealthy men were of Protestant origin. His answer was that it was these men who were also Calvinists, men who had internalized the religious code set down first by Calvin and then by the Puritans of 17th century England. In other words, the ethic says to work hard, save what you have made, and reinvest any profit in order to increase wealth. That is capitalism in a nutshell. Calvin does not invent this idea, he simply rationalizes it by ascribing a certain spirit or calling to certain men of his own age, all of whom just happened to be Calvinists. Of course, such a scheme could and did lead to tension, conflict and anxiety. How much of a calling was a good thing? When did one know when enough was enough? Anxiety and its sister guilt, then, seemed to become one of the guiding principles of Calvinism.
While Lutheranism spread widely in
The Reformation was a religious revolution in
Background on the Catholic Church:
I. The Church in the Middle Ages: During the Middle Ages, the Church was one of the most important institutions in
II. The Secularization of the Church: As man in general became interested in worldliness, so also did the men of the church. The church had always been involved in the affairs of the world and as those affairs became more secular, the church became involved in politics, wars, money, etc. The church began to drift away from religion and theology. The church sought new ways to obtain money to support itself. Many members of the clergy wanted to live in luxury and splendor, something the Bible specifically prohibited.
III. The Decline of the Church: By
v Simony – the buying and selling of church offices.
v Nepotism – the giving of offices on the basis of family relations rather than on merit.
v Pluralism – holding two or more church offices at the same time.
v Indulgences – “sinners” could buy their way out of time in Purgatory.
v Celibacy (or lack there of) – Pope Alexander VI openly acknowledged his children for instance; his most famous son was Caesar Borgia.
v The church also charged money for burial and the administration of the sacraments.
Financially the burden was on those poorer people who could not afford the “cost of religion.” The feeling existed that those with money could “buy their way into heaven,” and the higher clergy lived luxuriously. The money used for payment went to
Needless to say, these practices were blasphemy to those devoted to the teachings of Jesus described in the New Testament of the Bible. One such person was Martin Luther (1483-1531), a professor of religion at the
According to the official Church position, justification of one’s faith through monetary compensation was the only way to get into heaven – and the only way those in the Church elite could maintain their extravagant life styles. Luther, in his research however, came to the conclusion that justification of ones faith could only truly be determined by God, not the Pope (“Sin bravely and believe more strongly”).
Three basic differences emerged to Luther between the Church possession and the word of the Bible. Luther felt that:
· Salvation came thru faith alone (not thru ceremonies, priests, or papal decrees)
· That the Bible is the ultimate authority in Church matters (Popes can interpret, not decree church doctrine)
· All human beings are equal.
Luther, however, was not looking to establish a new church – he wanted to reform the current one (which was what the Ninety-five Theses were about in 1517). Obviously, the Pope and the Church establishment didn’t like these new interpretations.
This led to a standoff between two different modes of thought towards the future of Christianity. With the Church excommunicating him following his formal declaration of beliefs (Edict of Worms) in 1520 and HRE Charles V issuing a warrant for his arrest and execution in 1521, Luther was found allies in the German princes, who were seeking to expand their authority against the Church and the HRE.
This escalation within the German states led to a series of Civil Wars amongst the “protest”ants and the church loyalists, most notably the Thirty Years War, which ended in 1555 with the Treaty of Westphalia (more on that in a few days).
References
17. http://www.answers.com/topic/philosophy#ixzz2ggPxbwQP
18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
19. Copleston F. С. History of Philosophy, 8 vol.
20. Edwards, Paul, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vol.
21. Bartlett, Kenneth, ed. The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance: A Sourcebook (2nd ed. 2011)
22. Cronin, Vincent (1969), The Flowering of the Renaissance, ISBN 0-7126-9884-1
23. Cronin, Vincent (1992), The Renaissance, ISBN 0-00-215411-0
24. Campbell, Gordon. The
25. Ergang, Robert (1967), The Renaissance, ISBN 0-442-02319-7
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27. Fletcher, Stella. The Longman Companion to Renaissance
28. Grendler, Paul F., ed. The Renaissance: An Encyclopedia for Students. (2003). 970 pp.
29. Grendler, Paul F. “The Future of Sixteenth Century Studies: Renaissance and Reformation Scholarship in the Next Forty Years,”
30. Hale, John. The Civilization of
31. Hall, Bert S. Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance
32. Hattaway, Michael, ed. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture. (2000). 747 pp.
33. Jensen, De Lamar (1992), Renaissance Europe, ISBN 0-395-88947-2
34. Johnson, Paul. The Renaissance: A Short History. (2000). 197 pp. excerpt and text searc
The Philosophy of the New Age and Enlightenment.
The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason) was a cultural movement of intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries, first in
Originating about 1650 to 1700, it was sparked by philosophers Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), John Locke (1632–1704), Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), physicist Isaac Newton (1643–1727), and philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778). Ruling princes often endorsed and fostered figures and even attempted to apply their ideas of government in what was known as Enlightened Despotism. The Enlightenment flourished until about 1790–1800, after which the emphasis on reason gave way to Romanticism’s emphasis on emotion and a Counter-Enlightenment gained force.
In France, Enlightenment was based in the salons and culminated in the great Encyclopédie (1751–72) edited by Denis Diderot (1713–1784) with contributions by hundreds of leading philosophes (intellectuals) such as Voltaire (1694–1778), Rousseau (1712–1778) and Montesquieu (1689–1755). Some 25,000 copies of the 35 volume set were sold, half of them outside
The medieval view of the world as a hierarchical order of beings created and governed by God was supplanted by the mechanistic picture of the world as a vast machine, the parts of which move in accordance with strict physical laws, without purpose or will. In this view of the universe, known as Mechanism, science took precedence over spirituality, and the surrounding physical world that we experience and observe received as much, if not more, attention than the world to come. The aim of human life was no longer conceived as preparation for salvation in the next world, but rather as the satisfaction of people’s natural desires. Political institutions and ethical principles ceased to be regarded as reflections of divine command and came to be seen as practical devices created by humans.
The human mind itself seemed an inexhaustible reality, on a par with the physical reality of matter. Modern philosophers had the task of defining more clearly the essence of mind and of matter, and of reasoning about the relation between the two. Individuals ought to see for themselves, they believed, and study the “book of Nature,” and in every case search for the truth with their own reason.
Since the 15th century modern philosophy has been marked by a continuing interaction between systems of thought based on a mechanistic, materialistic interpretation of the universe and those founded on a belief in human thought as the only ultimate reality. This interaction has reflected the increasing effect of scientific discovery and political change on philosophical speculation.
Mechanism and Materialism
In the new philosophical climate, experience and reason became the sole standards of truth. The first great spokesman for the new philosophy was the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon, who denounced reliance on authority and verbal argument and criticized Aristotelian logic as useless for the discovery of new laws. Bacon called for a new scientific method based on reasoned generalization from careful observation and experiment. He was the first to formulate rules for this new method of drawing conclusions, now known as inductive inference.
Galileo
Galileo Galilei (Italian pronunciation: [ɡaliˈlɛːo ɡaliˈlɛi]; 15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642),[was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the “father of modern observational astronomy”, the “father of modern physics”, the “father of science”, and “the Father of Modern Science”.
quick facts
Galileo
Italian physicist and astronomer
Birth
February 15, 1564
Death
January 8, 1642
Place of Birth
Known for
Making a number of important astronomical discoveries, including the four moons of Jupiter, sunspots, and the myriad of stars that compose the Milky Way
Proposing that falling bodies would all fall at the same rate, regardless of mass, if there were no air resistance
Milestones
1589 Taught mathematics at the
1592 Taught mathematics at the
1609 Reinvented the telescope based on hearsay of such a device’s existence in
1610 Studied the heavens with his telescope, and discovered mountains on the Moon, thousands of stars too faint to be seen unaided, the phases of Venus, and other important astronomical findings
1610 Published several of his astronomical findings in Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger)
1610 Accepted a position as mathematician and philosopher to the Grand Duke of Tuscany
1632 Published a defense of the Copernican heliocentric (sun-centered) universe
1633 The Roman Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant his support of the Copernican system, and placed him under lifelong house arrest.
Did You Know
Galileo died in 1642, while under house arrest imposed upon him by the Roman Catholic Church. In 1992, the Church acknowledged that its condemnation of Galileo was a mistake.
Galileo helped develop the scientific method by using experimentation to test physical theories.
Galileo constructed the first thermometer.
Galileo (1564-1642), Italian physicist and astronomer, who, with the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, initiated the scientific revolution that flowered in the work of the English physicist Sir Isaac Newton. Born Galileo Galilei, his main contributions were, in astronomy, the use of the telescope in observation and the discovery of sunspots, lunar mountains and valleys, the four largest satellites of Jupiter, and the phases of Venus. In physics, he discovered the laws of falling bodies and the motions of projectiles. In the history of culture, Galileo stands as a symbol of the battle against authority for freedom of inquiry.
Galileo was borear
At
By December 1609, Galileo had built a telescope of 20 times magnification, with which he discovered mountains and craters on the moon. He also saw that the Milky Way was composed of stars, and he discovered the four largest satellites of Jupiter. He published these findings in March
Professors of philosophy scorned Galileo’s discoveries because Aristotle had held that only perfectly spherical bodies could exist in the heavens and that nothing new could ever appear there. Galileo also disputed with professors at
Early in 1616, Copernican books were subjected to censorship by edict, and the Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine instructed Galileo that he must no longer hold or defend the concept that the earth moves. Cardinal Bellarmine had previously advised him to treat this subject only hypothetically and for scientific purposes, without taking Copernican concepts as literally true or attempting to reconcile them with the Bible. Galileo remained silent on the subject for years, working on a method of determining longitudes at sea by using his predictions of the positions of Jupiter’s satellites, resuming his earlier studies of falling bodies, and setting forth his views on scientific reasoning in a book on comets, The Assayer (1623; trans. 1957).
In 1624 Galileo began a book he wished to call “Dialogue on the Tides,” in which he discussed the Ptolemaic and Copernican hypotheses in relation to the physics of tides. In 1630 the book was licensed for printing by Roman Catholic censors at
Galileo’s final book, Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences (trans. 1662-65), which was published at
Galileo’s most valuable scientific contribution was his founding of physics on precise measurements rather than on metaphysical principles and formal logic. More widely influential, however, were The Starry Messenger and the Dialogue, which opened new vistas in astronomy. Galileo’s lifelong struggle to free scientific inquiry from restriction by philosophical and theological interference stands beyond science. Since the full publication of Galileo’s trial documents in the 1870s, entire responsibility for Galileo’s condemnation has customarily been placed on the Roman Catholic church. This conceals the role of the philosophy professors who first persuaded theologians to link Galileo’s science with heresy. An investigation into the astronomer’s condemnation, calling for its reversal, was opened in 1979 by Pope John Paul II. In October
The work of Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo was of even greater importance in the development of a new worldview. Galileo brought attention to the importance of applying mathematics to the formulation of scientific laws. This he accomplished by creating the science of mechanics, which applied the principles of geometry to the motions of bodies. The success of mechanics in discovering reliable and useful laws of nature suggested to Galileo and to later scientists that all nature is designed in accordance with mechanical laws.
These great changes of the 15th and 16th centuries brought about two intellectual crises that profoundly affected Western civilization. First, the decline of Aristotelian science called into question the methods and foundations of the sciences. This decline came about for a number of reasons including the inability of Aristotelian principles to explaiew observations in astronomy. Second, new attitudes toward religion undermined religious authority and gave agnostic and atheistic ideas a chance to be heard.
Descartes
Descartes, René
I. INTRODUCTION
Descartes, René (1596-1650), French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, sometimes called the father of modern philosophy.
Born in
It was probably during the first years of his residence in the
II. PHILOSOPHY
Descartes attempted to apply the rational inductive methods of science, and particularly of mathematics, to philosophy. Before his time, philosophy had been dominated by the method of Scholasticism, which was entirely based on comparing and contrasting the views of recognized authorities. Rejecting this method, Descartes stated, “In our search for the direct road to truth, we should busy ourselves with no object about which we cannot attain a certitude equal to that of the demonstration of arithmetic and geometry.” He therefore determined to hold nothing true until he had established grounds for believing it true. The single sure fact from which his investigations began was expressed by him in the famous words Cogito, ergo sum,”I think, therefore I am.” From this postulate that a clear consciousness of his thinking proved his own existence, he argued the existence of God. God, according to Descartes’s philosophy, created two classes of substance that make up the whole of reality. One class was thinking substances, or minds, and the other was extended substances, or bodies.
III. SCIENCE
Descartes’s philosophy, sometimes called Cartesianism, carried him into elaborate and erroneous explanations of a number of physical phenomena. These explanations, however, had value, because he substituted a system of mechanical interpretations of physical phenomena for the vague spiritual concepts of most earlier writers. Although Descartes had at first been inclined to accept the Copernican theory of the universe with its concept of a system of spinning planets revolving around the sun, he abandoned this theory when it was pronounced heretical by the Roman Catholic church. In its place he devised a theory of vortices in which space was entirely filled with matter, in various states, whirling about the sun.
In the field of physiology, Descartes held that part of the blood was a subtle fluid, which he called animal spirits. The animal spirits, he believed, came into contact with thinking substances in the brain and flowed out along the channels of the nerves to animate the muscles and other parts of the body.
Descartes’s study of optics led him to the independent discovery of the fundamental law of reflection: that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. His essay on optics was the first published statement of this law. Descartes’s treatment of light as a type of pressure in a solid medium paved the way for the undulatory theory of light.
IV. MATHEMATICS
The most notable contribution that Descartes made to mathematics was the systematization of analytic geometry (see Geometry: Analytic Geometry). He was the first mathematician to attempt to classify curves according to the types of equations that produce them. He also made contributions to the theory of equations. Descartes was the first to use the last letters of the alphabet to designate unknown quantities and the first letters to designate known ones. He also invented the method of indices (as in x2) to express the powers of numbers. In addition, he formulated the rule, which is known as Descartes’s rule of signs, for finding the number of positive and negative roots for any algebraic equation.
During the 17th century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher René Descartes attempted to resolve both crises. He followed Bacon and Galileo in criticizing existing methods and beliefs, but whereas Bacon had argued for an inductive method based on observed facts, Descartes made mathematics the model for all science. Descartes championed the truth contained in the “clear and distinct ideas” of reason itself. The advance toward knowledge was from one such truth to another, as in mathematical reasoning. Descartes believed that by following his rationalist method, one could establish first principles (fundamental underlying truths) for all knowledge—about man, the world, and even God.
Descartes resolved to reconstruct all human knowledge on an absolutely certain foundation by refusing to accept any belief, even the belief in his own existence, until he could prove it to be necessarily true. In his so-called dream argument, he argued that our inability to prove with certainty when we are awake and when we are dreaming makes most of our knowledge uncertain. Ultimately he concluded that the first thing of whose existence one can be certain is oneself as a thinking being. This conclusion forms the basis of his well-known argument, “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). He also argued that, in pure thought, one has a clear conception of God and can demonstrate that God exists. Descartes argued that secure knowledge of the reality of God allowed him to have his earlier doubts about knowledge and science.
Despite his mechanistic outlook, Descartes accepted the traditional religious doctrine of the immortality of the soul and maintained that mind and body are two distinct substances, thus exempting mind from the mechanistic laws of nature and providing for freedom of the will. His fundamental separation of mind and body, known as dualism, raised the problem of explaining how two such different substances as mind and body can affect each other, a problem he was unable to solve that has remained a concern of philosophy ever since. Descartes’s thought launched an era of speculation in metaphysics as philosophers made a determined effort to overcome dualism—the belief in the irreconcilable difference between mind and matter—and obtain unity. The separation of mind and matter is also known as Cartesian dualism after Descartes.
Hobbes
Hobbes, Thomas
Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), English philosopher and political theorist (see Political Theory), one of the first modern Western thinkers to provide a secular justification for the political state. The philosophy of Hobbes marked a departure in English philosophy from the religious emphasis of Scholasticism. His ideas represented a reaction against the decentralizing ideas of the Reformation (1517-1648), which, Hobbes contended, brought anarchy (see Anarchism). Regarded as an important early influence on the philosophical doctrine of utilitarianism, Hobbes also contributed to modern psychology and laid the foundations of modern sociology by applying mechanistic principles (see Mechanism) in an attempt to explain human motivation and social organization. See also Thematic Essay: British Political and Social Thought.
Born in Malmesbury, Hobbes was educated at Magdalen Hall,
In 1642 Hobbes finished De Cive, (On Citizenship; translated in 1651), a statement of his theory of government. From 1646 to 1648 he was mathematics tutor to the Prince of Wales, later King Charles II, who was living in exile in
In 1660, when the Commonwealth ended and his former pupil acceded to the throne, Hobbes again came into favor. In 1666, however, the House of Commons passed a bill including Leviathan among the books to be investigated on charges of atheistic tendencies (Hobbes argued for a distinction between knowledge and faith and suggested that one could not gain a knowledge of God—see Atheism; Agnosticism). The measure caused Hobbes to burn many of his papers and to delay publication of three of his works: Behemoth: The History of the Causes of Civil Wars of England; Dialogues Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England; and a metrical Historia Ecclesiastica. At the age of 84, Hobbes wrote an autobiography in Latin verse. Within the next three years he translated into English verse the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. He died at the age of
Developing his politics and ethics from a naturalistic basis of self-interest (see Naturalism; Egoism), Hobbes held that since people are fearful and predatory they must submit to the absolute supremacy of the state, in both secular and religious matters, in order to live by reason and gain lasting preservation. Within psychology, he proposed that all human actions are caused by material phenomena (see Materialism), with people motivated by what he termed appetite (movement toward an object; similar to pleasure) or aversion (movement away from an object; similar to pain).
The 17th–century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his effort to attain unity, asserted that matter is the only real substance. He constructed a comprehensive system of metaphysics that provided a solution to the mind-body problem by reducing mind to the internal motions of the body. He also argued that there is no contradiction between human freedom and causal determinism—the view that every act is determined by a prior cause. Both, according to Hobbes, work in accordance with the mechanical laws that govern the universe.
In his ethical theory Hobbes derived the rules of human behavior from the law of self-preservation and justified egoistic action as the natural human tendency. In his political theory he maintained that government and social justice are artificial creations based on social contract (voluntary agreement between people and their government) and maintained by force. In his most famous work, Leviathan (1651), Hobbes justified political authority on the basis that self-interested people who existed in a terrifying “state of nature”—that is, without a ruler—would seek to protect themselves by forming a political commonwealth that had rules and regulations. He concluded that absolute monarchy is the most effective means of preserving peace.
Spinoza
Spinoza, Baruch
I. INTRODUCTION
Spinoza, Baruch or Spinoza, Benedict (1632-1677), Dutch rationalist philosopher and religious thinker, who is accounted the most thoroughgoing modern exponent of pantheism.
Born of Spanish-Portuguese Jewish parents in
II. PHILOSOPHY
Spinoza’s fullest expression is his great work Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (1677 Ethics Demonstrated with Geometrical Order). According to this treatise the universe is identical with God, who is the uncaused “substance” of all things. The conception of substance, which Spinoza derived from the Scholastic philosophers, is not that of a material reality but rather of a metaphysical entity, the comprehensive and self-sufficient basis for all reality. Spinoza conceded the possible existence of infinite attributes of substance, but held that only two are accessible to the human mind, namely, extension, or the world of material things, and conscious thought. Thought and extension are considered to depend on and exist in an ultimate reality, God. Causation, in Spinoza’s system, may exist between individual objects (that is, between physical bodies) in the attribute extension, or between individual ideas in the attribute thought, but not between objects and ideas. To explain the apparent causal interactions between objects and ideas, Spinoza advanced a theory known as parallelism, according to which every idea has a physical counterpart and, similarly, every physical object has an ideational counterpart.
The individuality of things, whether physical objects or ideas, Spinoza explained as particular modes of substance. All particular objects are the modes of God in the attribute extension; all particular ideas are the modes of God in the attribute thought. The modes are natura naturata,”nature begotten,” or nature in the multiplicity of its manifestations; substance or God is natura naturans, “nature begetting,” or nature in its creative unity, acting as the determiner of its own modes. The modes are transitory, and their existence assumes temporal form; God is eternal, transcending all modal changes. Particular things accordingly, whether of extension or of thought, are finite and evanescent. Spinoza maintained, nevertheless, that an indestructible world does exist. This world is not to be found in the realm of existent things but in that of essence. Humanity’s intuitive knowledge of God is the source of a spiritual love of God (amor Dei intellectualis), which in turn is a part of the love in which God loves himself.
Spinoza’s conception of essences is closely related to the Scholastic conception of “reals” and to Plato’s conception of archetypal Ideas, although it differs from both in certain important respects. Spinoza conceived essences as hypostatizations (conceptual entities) of the universal aspect of all things. The fundamental difference between existences and essences in Spinoza’s cosmology is that the former have their being in time, but the latter are outside of time. Because mortality can pertain only to things subject to the law of time, the realm of essences, being timeless, must consequently be eternal. Nevertheless, the realm of essences is a realm of immanent being.
Every existence has, as previously indicated, a universal or essential character, although to realize this character the existent thing must transcend its own intrinsic form, that is, free itself from the boundaries of its own structure. The realm of essences thus has a kind of being within the realm of existences (the former being the immanent cause of the latter), although it does not share its temporal limitation. Immanent causation, according to Spinoza’s metaphysics, means self-causation, and that which is self-determined is free. From this reasoning Spinoza developed his doctrine of freedom as a good to be won only in the realm of essences. Existence in either attribute (extension or thought) is bondage, for each existent thing is determined by its own causal series; every particular object or idea is subject to other objects or ideas, and the form of its being is determined by them. Only in nontemporal, self-caused being, that is, in the universal and immanent, is complete freedom possible; only by identification with substance, or God, is immortality, and with it peace, obtained.
III. REJECTION OF THE TRADITIONAL
Spinoza rejected providence and freedom of will, and his concept of an impersonal God was hostilely received by many of his contemporaries. His position in the history of philosophy is in many respects unique. He belonged to no school and founded none. Although to some extent his work was based on that of a few of his predecessors, it is too strikingly individual to be regarded as a mere continuation, even of the thought of Descartes. In the depth and grandeur of his conception, and in his remarkable power of synthesis, Spinoza ranks with the greatest philosophical thinkers. Only a century after his death on February 21, 1677, did his thought gain recognition, and although his system gave rise to no organized following, he has had perhaps the most pervasive influence of all modern philosophers with the exception of Immanuel Kant, a German. Not only metaphysicians but poets such as Goethe (a German) and William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley (both British) have consulted the works of Spinoza for inspiration, and his thought has influenced the poetic pantheism of many modern interpretations of nature.
Whereas Hobbes tried to oppose Cartesian dualism by reducing mind to matter, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza attempted to reduce matter to divine spiritual substance. He constructed a remarkably precise and rigorous system of philosophy that offered new solutions to the mind-body problem and to the conflict between religion and science. Like Descartes, Spinoza maintained that the entire structure of nature can be deduced from a few basic definitions and axioms, on the model of Euclidean geometry. However, Spinoza believed that Descartes’s theory of two substances created an insoluble problem of the way in which mind and body interact. He concluded that the ultimate substance is God and that God, substance, and nature are identical. Thus he supported the pantheistic view that all things are aspects or modes of God (see Pantheism).
Spinoza’s solution to the mind-body problem explained the apparent interaction of mind and body by regarding them as two forms of the same substance, which exactly parallel each other, thus seeming to affect each other but not really doing so. Spinoza’s ethics, like the ethics of Hobbes, was based on a materialistic psychology according to which individuals are motivated only by self-interest. But in contrast to Hobbes, Spinoza concluded that rational self-interest coincides with the interest of others.
Locke
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers.
English philosopher John Locke responded to the challenge of Cartesian dualism by supporting a commonsense view that the corporeal (bodily or material) and the spiritual are simply two parts of nature that remain always present in human experience. He made no attempt to rigorously define these parts of nature or to construct a detailed system of metaphysics that attempted to explain them; Locke believed that such philosophical aims were impossible to carry out and thus pointless. Against the rationalism of Descartes and Spinoza, who believed in the ability to achieve knowledge through reasoning and logical deduction, Locke continued the empiricist tradition begun by Bacon and embraced by Hobbes. The empiricists believed that knowledge came from observation and sense perceptions rather than from reason alone.
In 1690 Locke gave empiricism a systematic framework with the publication of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Of particular importance was Locke’s redirection of philosophy away from the study of the physical world and toward the study of the human mind. In so doing he made epistemology, the study of the nature of knowledge, the principal concern of philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. In his own theory of the mind Locke attempted to reduce all ideas to simple elements of experience, but he distinguished sensation and reflection as sources of experience, sensation providing the material for knowledge of the external world, and reflection the material for knowledge of the mind.
Locke greatly influenced the skepticism of later British thinkers, such as George Berkeley and David Hume, by recognizing the vagueness of the concepts of metaphysics and by pointing out that inferences about the world outside the mind cannot be proved with certainty. His ethical and political writings had an equally great influence on subsequent thought. During the late 18th century the founders of the modern school of utilitarianism, which makes happiness for the largest possible number of people the standard of right and wrong, drew heavily on the writings of Locke. His defense of constitutional government, religious tolerance, and natural human rights influenced the development of liberal thought during the late 18th century in
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, political economist and civil servant. He was an influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy. He has been called “the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century”. Mill’s conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham. Hoping to remedy the problems found in an inductive approach to science, such as confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the premises of falsification as the key component in the scientific method. Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy.
Jeremy Bentham was a British philosopher, jurist and social reformer. He is regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.
Bentham became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts. He called for the abolition of slavery and the death penalty, and for the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children. Though strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights, calling them “nonsense upon stilts”.
Bentham’s students included his secretary and collaborator James Mill, the latter’s son, John Stuart Mill, the legal philosopher John Austin, as well as influential political figures such as Robert Owen, one of the founders of modern socialism. Bentham has been described as the “spiritual founder” of University College London, though he played little direct part in its foundation. In recent years he has become known as an early advocate of animal rights.
Adam Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith is best known for two classic works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. Smith is cited as the father of modern economics and is still among the most influential thinkers in the field of economics today. In 2009, Smith was named among the “Greatest Scots” of all time, in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV.
Smith studied social philosophy at the
Idealism and Skepticism
Efforts to resolve the dualism of mind and matter, a problem first raised by Descartes, continued to engage philosophers during the 17th and 18th centuries. The division between science and religious belief also occupied them. There, the aim was to preserve the essentials of faith in God while at the same time defending the right to think freely. One view called Deism saw God as the cause of the great mechanism of the world, a view more in harmony with science than with traditional religion. Natural science at this time was striding ahead, relying on sense perception as well as reason, and thereby discovering the universal laws of nature and physics. Such empirical (observation-based) knowledge appeared to be more certain and valuable than philosophical knowledge based upon reason alone.
After Locke philosophers became more skeptical about achieving knowledge that they could be certain was true. Some thinkers who despaired of finding a resolution to dualism embraced skepticism, the doctrine that true knowledge, other than what we experience through the senses, is impossible. Others turned to increasingly radical theories of being and knowledge. Among them was German philosopher Immanuel Kant, probably the most influential of all because he set Western philosophy on a new path that it still follows today. Kant’s view that knowledge of the world is dependent upon certain innate categories or ideas in the human mind is known as idealism.
Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (sometimes von Leibniz or Leibnitz) was a German mathematician and philosopher.
German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, like Spinoza before him, worked in the rationalist (reason-based) tradition to produce a brilliant solution to the problems raised by dualism. Leibniz, a mathematician and statesman as well as a philosopher, developed a remarkably subtle and original system of philosophy that combined the mathematical and physical discoveries of his time with the organic and religious conceptions of nature found in ancient and medieval thought. Leibniz viewed the world as an infinite number of infinitely small units of force, called monads, each of which is a closed world but mirrors all the other monads through its activity, which is perception. All the monads are spiritual entities, but they can combine to form material bodies. Leibniz conceived of God as the Monad of Monads, which creates all other monads and predestines their development.
Leibniz’s theory of the predestination of monads, also called the theory of preestablished harmony, entailed a radical rejection of causality—the view that every effect must have a cause. According to Leibniz, monads do not interact with each other at all, and the appearance of mechanical causality in the natural world is unreal, akin to an illusion. Likewise, there is no room in the universe for free will: Even though we enjoy the illusion of acting freely, all human actions are predetermined by God. Despite these gloomy conclusions, Leibniz’s philosophy was profoundly optimistic because he argued that ours was the best of all possible worlds. He based this belief on considerations about the nature of truth and necessity. French writer Voltaire mocked this viewpoint in Candide (1759), a satirical novel that examines the woes heaped on the world in the name of God.
Berkeley
George Berkeley, also known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne), was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called “immaterialism” (later referred to as “subjective idealism” by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived. Thus, as
In the 18th century Irish philosopher and Anglican churchman George Berkeley, like Spinoza before him, rejected both Cartesian dualism and the assertion by Hobbes that only matter is real.
Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.
Whereas
All metaphysical assertions about things that cannot be directly perceived are equally meaningless, Hume claimed, and should be “committed to the flames.” In his analyses of causality and induction, Hume revealed that there is no logical justification for believing that any two events which occur together are connected by cause and effect or for making any inference from past to future. Hume noted that we depend on our past experience whenever we form beliefs about anything that we do not directly perceive and whenever we make predictions about the future. According to the empiricist doctrine of Bacon, Locke, and Berkeley, we can do this because experience teaches us what particular things belong together as causes and effects. Hume, however, argued that this attempt to learn from experience is not at all rational, thus calling into question the reliability of our memories, our reasoning processes, and our ability to learn from past experiences or to make even the smallest predictions about the future—for example, that the sun will rise tomorrow. Though extreme, Hume’s skepticism about philosophical empiricism raised problems about the possibility of knowledge that contemporary philosophers still struggle to resolve.
Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg in
German philosopher Immanuel Kant was among the first to appreciate Hume’s skepticism, and in response he published the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), widely considered the greatest single work in modern philosophy. In this work Kant made a thorough and systematic analysis of the conditions for knowledge. As an example of genuine knowledge, he had in mind the contributions to physics of English scientist Isaac Newton. In the case of Newtonian physics, reason seemed to have done an effective job of understanding the data supplied by the senses and to have succeeded in postulating universal and necessary laws of nature, such as the law of gravitation and the laws of motion. Kant proposed to explain how such knowledge is possible, thereby providing a complete reply to Hume’s skepticism and answering many of the problems that had plagued Western philosophers since the time of Descartes.
Kant started by making a fresh analysis of the elements of knowledge, asking for the first time an extremely basic question, “How is our experience possible in the first place?” Kant’s predecessors had taken experience for granted. Thus Descartes agreed that we seem to have sensory knowledge of the world but asked whether this knowledge was true or the result of a dream. Similarly, Hume’s skepticism about causation arose when he concluded that we do not encounter causality in our ordinary experience of the world and that any inferences about it, beyond immediate experience, were questionable. Kant’s answer to the skepticism of Descartes and Hume involved certain categories, such as space, time, substance, and causality, which he maintained are essential to our thinking and to our experience of phenomena in the world. These categories he called transcendental. All objects of our knowledge, he concluded, must conform to the human mind’s essential ways of perceiving and understanding—ways that involve the transcendental categories—if they are to be knowable at all. Kant maintained that he had developed a revolutionary hypothesis about knowledge and reality that he believed to be as significant for the future of philosophy as the hypothesis of Copernicus—that the planets orbit the Sun—had been for science.
Kant’s claim that causality, substance, space, and time are forms imposed by the mind gave support to the idealism of Leibniz and Berkeley. Kant, however, made his view a more critical form of idealism by granting the empiricist claim that things-in-themselves—that is, things as they exist outside human experience—are unknowable. Kant therefore limited knowledge to the “phenomenal world” of experience, maintaining that metaphysical beliefs about the soul, the cosmos, and God (the “noumenal world” transcending human experience) are matters of faith rather than of scientific knowledge.
In his ethical writings Kant held that moral principles are categorical imperatives, absolute commands of reason that permit no exceptions and are not related to pleasure or practical benefit. Kant argued that human beings should act as members of an ideal “kingdom of ends” in which every person is treated as an end in himself or herself, and never as a means to someone else’s ends. In addition, everyone should govern their conduct as if their actions were to be made law—a law that applies equally to all without exception. Kant thereby postulated a freedom of action based on moral order and equality. His moral philosophy contributed to modern political ideas about freedom and democracy. Kant was a leading figure of the movement for reason and liberty against tradition and authority, and in his religious teachings he emphasized individual conscience and represented God primarily as a moral ideal.
Kant’s writings constituted a
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher. He was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. Fichte is often perceived as a figure whose philosophy forms a bridge between the ideas of Kant and those of the German Idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Recently, philosophers and scholars have begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness. Like Descartes and Kant before him, he was motivated by the problem of subjectivity and consciousness. Fichte also wrote works of political philosophy and is considered one of the fathers of Germaationalism.
François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plume Voltaire (pronounced: [vɔl.tɛːʁ]), was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, freedom of expression, free trade and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken supporter of social reform, despite strict censorship laws with harsh penalties for those who broke them. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.
Voltaire was one of several Enlightenment figures (along with Montesquieu, John Locke, Richard Price, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Émilie du Châtelet) whose works and ideas influenced important thinkers of both the American and French Revolutions.
Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism of French expression. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.
His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise was of importance to the development of pre-romanticism and romanticism in fiction. Rousseau’s autobiographical writings—his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker—exemplified the late 18th-century movement known as the Age of Sensibility, featuring an increasing focus on subjectivity and introspection that has characterized the modern age. His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and his On the Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought.
Rousseau was a successful composer of music. He wrote seven operas as well as music in other forms, and he made contributions to music as a theorist.
During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophes among members of the Jacobin Club. Rousseau, a Freemason, was interred as a national hero in the Panthéon in
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d’Alembert.
Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master), which emulated Laurence Sterne in challenging conventions regarding novels and their structure and content, while also examining philosophical ideas about free will. Diderot is also known as the author of the dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew), upon which many articles and sermons about consumer desire have been based.
Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the
For many years he was the British postmaster for the colonies, which enabled him to set up the first national communications network. He was active in community affairs, colonial and state politics, as well as national and international affairs. From 1785 to 1788, he served as governor of
His colorful life and legacy of scientific and political achievement, and status as one of America’s most influential Founding Fathers, have seen Franklin honored on coinage and money; warships; the names of many towns, counties, educational institutions, namesakes, and companies; and more than two centuries after his death, countless cultural references.
Thomas Jefferson was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the third President of the
Elected president in what Jefferson called the Revolution of 1800, he oversaw the purchase of the vast
A leader in the Enlightenment, Jefferson was a polymath who spoke five languages fluently and was deeply interested in science, invention, architecture, religion and philosophy, interests that led him to the founding of the
Thomas Paine was an English-American political activist, author, political theorist and revolutionary. As the author of two highly influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, he inspired the American Patriots in 1776 to declare independence from
Born in
Paine lived in
In 1802, he returned to
References
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38. Edwards, Paul, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vol.
