2. Read the text again. Structure the information in the form of a mind map. Use your mind map to summarise the text.

* Appendix 1 p. 145

Unit 2. Retrospective review of philosophy

1. Read the text and answer the questions.

1. When did the Modern Philosophy develop?

2. What are its main periods?

3. What were the common goals and ideas set by the philosophers of 17^th century?

4. What was the essence of the 18^th century philosophy?

5. What are the basic trends of the contemporary philosophy?

Philosophy may not be the oldest profession but it is the oldest discipline, the source of our views about reality, knowledge, and morality. To understand the revolutionary nature of the evolutionary history of philosophy is to understand ourselves and our world anew.

Philosophy progresses, it evolves, it rarely stands still. Though philosophers build upon the work of their predecessors, they continually revise and often overthrow the views of their predecessors - sometimes, even those of their own teachers. One of the most famous examples is the sequence from Socrates to Plato to Aristotle. And yet, throughout the evolution of thought that philosophy heralds, much remains the same: the call to wonder, to dispute, to question, to liberate, to ponder, to inquire, to understand everything one can about the whole of our being - reality, knowledge, and morality - without becoming ourselves closed off.

To see new wisdom in the old and old wisdom in the new is to be not just learned but also wise. And not just to tolerate such expansive openness but also to love it now and then is what it means to be a philosopher, then and now.

Modern Philosophy

The modern period begins in about 1600. It is marked by two major changes. First, there is the dawning of modem science, which led eventually to the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century. Second, Europe was in political turmoil and wars for much of the early modern period, as there were increasing religious conflicts between and within nation-states.

Much of the early modern philosophy, up until around 1700, was devoted to laying the philosophical foundations for the new science and to rejecting medieval Scholasticism. The early modern thinkers, such as Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) and Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650), rediscovered the ancient concept of inert matter, and from it developed the idea of explaining all physical changes through a few simple mechanical laws of motion. The early moderns, such as Baruch de Spinoza (1632 - 1677) and John Locke (1632 - 1704), tried to show how the new science could be reconciled with the fundamentals of religion, such as belief in God, and with a rational conception of morality. Philosophers of the early modern period were also concerned with rethinking political theory. Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) tried to show how a rational foundation for power would be based on a social contract, and Locke refined this idea.

By the time Sir Isaac Newton published his major work in physics (1687), Scholasticism was no longer the dominant intellectual force in Europe and after 1700, and some philosophers turned their critical light onto aspects of modern science itself. For instance, Gottfried Leibniz (1646 - 1716) and George Berkeley (1685 - 1753) both argued against the concept of inert matter, trying to revitalise an idealist or nonmaterialist and religious metaphysics. In sharp contrast, David Hume (1711 - 1778) presented a thoroughgoing Skepticism that seemed to make all metaphysics impossible.

The work of Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) ushers at the end of the modern period. His main aim was to synthesise a system that made sense of the different strands of modern philosophy. He criticised the metaphysics inherent of the works of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz and, at the same time, tried to answer the Skepticism of Hume. Part of his proposed solution is a view called transcendental idealism, which denies that the real world of objects in space and time is absolute. Kant also proposed this theory to show how scientific causality could be reconciled with human freedom of action or autonomy and, hence, with morality. Kant's insistence on the importance of autonomy and liberty for moral and political theory also makes him an Enlightenment thinker, like his predecessor Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778), whose political theory ignited the French Revolution.

Nineteenth'Century Philosophy

Kant had tried to find an intermediary position between idealism and materialism. His development of what he called 'critical' or 'transcendental' idealism, based on his distinction between the phenomenal, knowable world of appearances and the unknowable, noumenal world of things-in-themselves, laid the foundation for an entirely new way of inquiry, inspiring scientists as well as philosophers to this day. However, ironically, his work also inspired a century of idealistic thinkers such as Johann Fitche (1762 -1814), Friedrich Schelling (1775 - 1854), Georg Hegel (1770 - 1831), and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) in Germany; in Britain, Francis Bradley (1846 - 1924) and John McTaggart (1866 - 1925); and in the United States, Josiah Royce (1855 - 1916).

Especially after the French Revolution, some philosophers took a great interest in history: does history show a pattern of progress? Hegel proposed an idealist reading of history on a grand scale. He builds with Kantian thoroughness an idealist metaphysical system in which the mind does not merely structure and regulate reality but wholly generates and constitutes it, up to and including itself. What he calls "the Absolute," the world as it exists in itself, is mind or spirit, such that everything that is, was, or will be is an evolving form within the world-mind, where the forces of evolution are driven not by events in the past or present, but by the still-uncreated future.

Partly in reaction to the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, some nineteenth- century thinkers stressed the importance of the nonrational side of human nature, such as feelings and the will. In the first half of the century, this took the form of Romanticism, which stressed the importance of the emotions. Later, it took the form of an emphasis on the will, especially in the works of Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900).

Twentieth’ Century Philosophy

At the dawn of the twentieth century, perhaps two of the most influential figures in philosophy were Gottlob Frege (1848 - 1925) and Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938), who stand as pioneers respectively of the analytic and continental traditions. Frege's main work was in the philosophy of mathematics, and his rigorous approach to logic and language inspired many other thinkers, many of whom saw a primary function of philosophy as clarifying and extending the concepts of science. Writers such as Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), Rudolf Carnap (1891 - 1970), A. J. Ayer (1910 - 1989), and W. V. O. Quine (1908 - 2000) belong to this tradition, broadly conceived.

In sharp contrast, Husserl saw the main work of philosophy as providing an alternative to the scientific method by characterising the nature of experience as it is lived by the subject. To this end, he developed the phenomenological method, which was adapted by his pupil Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976) in order to uncover the main characteristics and significance of the human mode of being. Although Heidegger coined the term 'existential,' it is Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908 - 1986) who are usually called existentialists. One of Sartre's main aims is to characterise how bad faith leads people to deny the existential or life-choices that face them. De Beauvoir's main aim is to show how women are and have been subjugated.

One recent debate within the continental tradition has been between Jiirgen Habermas (1929-) and some of the postmodern thinkers, such as Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984) and Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004). Habermas tries to develop a conception of reason and moral value based on the nature of communication, and this forms the basis of his participatory conception of democracy and of his social critique of aspects of capitalism. In sharp contrast, postmodern thinkers, drawing inspiration from Nietzsche, try to undermine this type of universal philosophical project and the conception of reason that it depends on. In comparison with postmodernism, the socialist theory of Habermas, which comes from the continental tradition, seems relatively closer to the liberal theory of John Rawls (1921 - 2002), which comes from the analytic tradition of philosophy.

Indeed, from the 1960s onward, the sharp divide between continental and analytic philosophy in some ways has become blurred. This is partly because of the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who was in part responsible for changing the emphasis of much analytic philosophy away from the scientific perspective inherent in the logical positivist writings of Carnap and Ayer. This influence is seen in the work of Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), who argues that science involves a commitment to certain paradigms.