Modern Thought
Under Construction
Modern thought begins with
the scientific revolution inaugurated by Nicolaus Copernicus.
The Scientific Revolution
Nicolaus Copernicus
(19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543), a Polish monk and astronomer, developed the
heliocentric theory of the solar system which replaced the geocentric theory of
the cosmos developed by the Hellenistic astronomer Ptolemy. Copernicus
published On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543 just before
his death, It is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and
the beginning of the scientific revolution.
The scientific revolution brought
to an end the medieval world view and replaced it with our modern understanding
of physics, nature, biology, and human beings.
Tycho Brahe (b. 1546-1601) was a Danish
astronomer who scanned the heavens with his naked eyes and kept accurate records
of where the planets were in relation to the Zodiac.
Johannes Kepler (b 1571 – 1630) was a
German astronomer who used the observations produced by Brahe to re-evaluate the
Copernican theory. Copernicus had assumed that the planets travel in
circular motions around the sun. In fact, we now know, they travel in
ellipses with the sun as one focus. Kepler was the first to propose
elliptical orbiss.
Galileo Galilei (b. 1564 – 1642) was an Italian astronomer.
He popularized and supported the Copernican theory. Using information
about a Dutch telescope, he built his own telescope. Galileo was the first
to notice sunspots and the moons of Jupiter. His work in ballistics led to
the understanding that cannonballs travel in hyperbolic motions. He also
experimented with vacuums and showed that a feather and a led ball fall at the
same rate. He laid the foundation for the works on gravity produced by
Newton. The Catholic Church condemned his writings on the heliocentric
theory, he was brought before the Roman Inquisition, and adjured his "false
beliefs." Galileo was no hero and did not wish to be executed as a
heretic.
Isaac Newton (b. 1643 – 1727) was an English
scientist. Worked out the theory of gravity to explain the motions of the
planets. His mechanistic view of nature had a major influence on thinking.
He more than any other man ushered in the scientific revolution, which is
ongoing.
The scientific revolution produced the Age of Reason of
the 17th, the Age of
Enlightenment of the 18th, the Age of Ideology of the 19th,
and the Age of Analysis of the 20th centuries. These developments
are a major threat of our course this semester.
The Philosophical Revolution or the
Age of Reason
Rene Descartes 1596 - 1650
Benedict Spinoza 1632 - 1677
Francis Bacon 1561 - 1626
Thomas Hobbes 1588 - 1679
John Locke 1632 - 1704
David Hume 1711 - 1776
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 – 1778
Immanuel Kant 1724 - 1804
The Age of Reason was produced by a small number of
intellectual giants who radically transformed Western thought. Plato and
Aristotle were replaced with a new conception of nature, man, and morality.
Instead of a universe governed by teleology and a striving to reach absolute
perfection, nature is held to refer to the material world of our senses, which
appears to be governed by mechanical laws, whose regularities our reason is able
to discern. Isaac Newton described a universe governed by force, mass,
distance, and gravity. From the laws of physics and astronomy, scientists
moved to develop the laws of chemical reactions, the germ theory of disease, and
the laws of genetic evolution.
The Newtonian universe has profound implications on man's
understanding of himself. It impacts on all of our moral and religious
beliefs. Modern philosophy is based on the findings and implications of
modern science. Or, put the other way, philosophers have been trying to
reconcile many philosophical ideas with the implications of modern science.
Modern philosophy is divided into rationalists and
empiricists. Continental Philosophers tend to be rationalists; while the
Anglo-Saxons prefer empiricism. In the philosophy of Kant, these two
strands of thought were brought together.
Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650 ) may be
viewed as the beginning of modern, rationalist philosophy. He based his
philosophy on doubt. How can I be sure that what I think is true is really
true. During his lifetime both the truths of religion and the truths of
science had become uncertain. The Protestants had successfully challenged
the authority of the Catholic Church. Copernicus and Galileo had
challenged the geocentric view of nature. If ideas that had been held by
almost everyone to be true for over 1500 years could now be found to be in
error, then how could one trust any authority?
But Descartes also challenged the "authority" of our
senses. Our senses do not provide us with accurate information. It
looks like the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. It travels
around the earth according to our senses. But actually, we are told, it is
the earth that travels around the sun. Common sense tells us that objects
don't move unless pushed. But objects in a vacuum once in motion remain in
motion according to Newtown. Have you ever seen an atom or an electron or
a gravitron? But modern physics tells us that these concepts describe the
building blocks of nature.
Descartes answered his position of philosophical doubt with
the famous maxim: "I think, therefore I am." Thought provides the
starting point for his philosophy. Descartes differentiates between mind
and matter. Thought is distinct from the physical world that our senses
disclose to us. It is thought, our mind, which provides us with the
concepts that allows us to think and to come to understand the world.
Descartes is a dualist like Plato. For Plato, the distinction was between
the absolute forms and our sense impressions; for Descartes it is between mind
and matter.
Descartes explores his mind and finds within his mind
certain "clear and distinct ideas." The most important of these "clear and
distinct ideas" is his idea of God. God is perfection. God would not
deceive us. Therefore, the physical world is really out there (not just a
dream or a figment of our imagination) and we can proceed with out scientific
exploration of the the physical world and its laws.
Descartes uses the ontological argument for the existence
of God. God is the concept that includes perfection. Physical
existence must be one of the attributes of an all perfect concept. A God
who exists only as an idea in my mind is not as perfect as a God who also
physically exists. Hence God must also have the attribute of physical
existence. This is a logical argument; it does not empirically prove His
physical existence.
Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) may be viewed as
the beginning of modern, empirical philosophy. One could claim Francis
Bacon but his writings are more diffuse. Hobbes was a materialist.
Human beings are governed by desires and aversions. We describe as good
those things that we desire and bad those things that could harm us.
Before governments and civil society were created, humans lived in a state of
nature. Humans in the state of nature have natural rights. The right
of each person to seek to preserve his life is one of the fundamental natural
rights that cannot be given up. In the state of nature, there is as yet no
private property and each person may take whatever he or she wants. Each
person is completely free to do whatever they desire. Each person has
complete liberty. Each person has the natural rights of life, liberty, and
the pursuit of property (later changed to happiness by Thomas Jefferson).
In the state of nature according to Hobbes, each person is equal in that even
"the weakest he" can kill "the strongest he" when he is sleeping. In
Hobbes state of nature, the life of man is "nasty, brutish, cruel, and short."
It is an entirely undesirable condition.
But Hobbes acknowledges that human beings do have reason.
They can perceive the undesirability of the state of nature and, through a
social contract, they can create a government that will provide them with order.
Hobbes lived during the English Civil War that ended up executing King Charles
I. For Hobbes, even the most oppressive government is preferable to the
wantonness of the state of nature. Hobbes was a defender of absolute
government, but he provided a modern "explanation" or justification for
government as such. Government is formed by a social contract. In
Hobbes this contract is indissoluble. Once you give up your natural
rights, you cannot get them back.
John Locke (1632 - 1704) "humanized" the ideas
of Hobbes. Locke kept all the elements of the Hobbsian social
contract theory, but postulated that life in the state of nature really wasn't
as bad as Hobbes made it out to be. Most humans are pretty decent.
The state of nature was OK. But there are the proverbial "rotten apples."
The state of nature has certain inconveniences. Creating a civil society
and government are useful. They improve our social life with each other.
It is useful to have roads, a property office to register titles to property,
and even a militia for defense against outside invasion. Locke has humans
make a social contract to create a government for limited purposes. When
we create government, we don't give up our natural rights. We even
preserve a right of revolution if government becomes oppressive and oversteps
the bounds of the contract whereby it was created. It is the Lockean
version of the social contract theory that has become the philosophical basis
for the justification of limited, constitutional government. Our American
form of government derives from Locke's ideas. Locke lived through the
Glorious Revolution in England. His writings justify this relatively
peaceful change of government. Locke is the father of modern democratic
thought.
Constitutional and Democratic Thought
The Social Contract Theory of the State
David Hume, John Locke, and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
State of Nature
Human Nature
"the life of
man is nasty, brutish, cruel, and short"
basically
decent
"man is born
free and everywhere he is in chains"
Social Contract
Natural Rights
Life,
Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property (Happiness)
Freedom of Religion and Conscience
Limited, Constitutional Government
Equality
Democracy
The Enlightenment
The eighteenth century is the Age of Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment popularizes the ideas developed during the Age of Reason.
The Enlightenment is basically the view or belief that modern science and our
understanding of the social world derived from modern science can help us to
improve the living conditions on this planet. War, poverty, and injustice
are not God-given punishments for our sinfulness but bad management.
Oppressive governments can be reformed or overthrown. Social inequality
can be alleviated and, maybe, overcome. Disease is not to be accepted
stoically but to be fought with new medicines. Poverty can be reduced
through the productivity of new inventions and technologies. Ignorance can
be overcome through universal public education. Human societies are
perfectible if only we have the will and use our scientific knowledge to plan
and socially engineer for a better future. There is no limit to what human
reason and ingenuity can achieve.
The French Enlightenment thinkers are known as the
philosophes. They are not really philosophers but what we would today call
journalists or popularizers.
One of the great achievements of the philosophes was the
publication of the Encyclopédie. All those who contributed articles are
known as the Encyclopedists. Philosophes and encyclopedists are often used
as interchangeable terms when describing the French Enlightenment.
Important figures of the Enlightenment era include:
Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784)
Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717 – 1783)
Voltaire pseudonym for François-Marie Arouet (1694 – 1778)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 – 1778
Gotthold Lessing
Immanuel Kant 1724 - 1804
Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809
Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826)
Below are
two articles from Wikipedia, with links, that further elaborate on this
material.
The Enlightenment
"This article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long
as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license", and
provide a link to http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
In the period known as The Enlightenment, Eighteenth-century
Europe
saw remarkable cultural changes characterized by a loss of faith in traditional
religious and political sources of authority and a turn toward democracy,
human
rights, and science.
In his famous 1784
essay "What Is Enlightenment?", Immanuel
Kant defined it as "man's emergence from his self-incurred
immaturity" ("der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner
selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit").
The upheavals of the Enlightenment led directly to the American
Revolutionary War as well as the French
Revolution and significantly influenced the Industrial
Revolution.
The Enlightenment was also marked by the rise of capitalism
and the wide availability of printed
materials.
Encyclopédie
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"This article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long
as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license", and
provide a link to http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences,
des arts et des métiers (English:
Encyclopedia, or a systematic
dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts) was a
general
encyclopedia published in
France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements and
revisions in 1772, 1777 and 1780 and numerous foreign editions
and later derivatives.
Its introduction, the
Preliminary Discourse, is considered an important
exposition of
Enlightenment ideals. The Encyclopédie's
self-professed aim was "to change the way people think." It was
hoped that the work would eventually encompass all of human
knowledge;
Denis Diderot explained the goal of the project as "All
things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception
and without regard for anyone's feelings."[1]
Origins
The Encyclopédie was originally meant to be simply a
French translation of
Ephraim Chambers's
Cyclopaedia (1728).[2]
The translation was commissioned by Paris book publisher
André Le Breton in 1743 to
John Mills, an English resident in France. In May 1745 Le
Breton announced the work as available for sale - however to Le
Breton's dismay, Mills had not done the work he was commissioned
to do; in fact, he could barely read and write French and did
not even own a copy of Cyclopaedia. Le Breton had been
swindled, and so he physically beat Mills with a cane—Mills sued
on assault charges, but Le Breton was acquitted in court as
being justified.[3]
Setting out to find a new editor, Le Breton engaged
Jean Paul de Gua de Malves. Among those hired by Malves were
the young
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac,
Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot. Within thirteen
months, in August 1747, Malves was fired due to his rigid
methods. Le Breton then hired Diderot and Jean d'Alembert as the
new editors. Diderot would remain editor for the next 25 years,
seeing the Encyclopédie through to completion.
Publication
The work comprised 35 volumes, with 71,818 articles, and
3,129 illustrations. The first 28 volumes were published between
1751 and 1766 and were edited by
Diderot - although some of the later picture-only volumes
were not actually printed until 1772. The remaining five volumes
were completed by other editors in 1777, along with a two volume
index in 1780. Many of the most noted figures of the French
enlightenment contributed to the work including
Voltaire,
Rousseau, and
Montesquieu.[2]
The single greatest contributor was
Louis de Jaucourt who wrote 17,266 articles, or about 8 per
day between 1759 and 1765.
The writers of the encyclopedia saw it as a vehicle to
covertly destroy
superstitions while overtly providing access to human
knowledge. It was a summary of thought and belief of
the Enlightenment. In
ancien régime France it caused a storm of controversy,
due mostly to its tone of religious tolerance. The encyclopedia
praised
Protestant thinkers and challenged
Catholic dogma, and classified religion as a branch of
philosophy, not as the ultimate source of knowledge and
moral advice. The entire work was banned by
royal decree and officially closed down after the first
seven volumes in 1759;[4]
but because it had many highly placed supporters, notably
Madame de Pompadour, work continued "in secret". In truth,
secular authorities did not want to disrupt the commercial
enterprise which employed hundreds of people. To appease the
church's enemies of the project, the authorities had officially
banned the enterprise, but they turned a blind eye to its
continued existence.
It was also a vast compendium of the technologies of the
period, describing the traditional craft tools and processes.
Much information was taken from the
Descriptions des Arts et Métiers.
In 1750 the full title was Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire
raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société
de gens de lettres, mis en ordre par M. Diderot de l'Académie
des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Prusse, et quant à la partie
mathématique, par M. d'Alembert de l'Académie royale des
Sciences de Paris, de celle de Prusse et de la Société royale de
Londres. The title-page was amended as d'Alembert acquired
more titles.
In 1775,
Charles Joseph Panckoucke obtained the rights to reissue the
work. He issued five volumes of supplementary material and a two
volume index from 1776 to 1780. Some include these seven volumes
as part of the first full issue of the Encyclopédie, for a total
of 35 volumes, although they were not written or edited by the
original famed authors.
From 1782 to 1832, Panckoucke and his successors published an
expanded edition of the work in 166 volumes as the
Encyclopédie méthodique. That work, enormous for the
time, occupied a thousand workers in production and 2,250
contributors.
The Encyclopédie presented a
taxonomy of human knowledge (See fig.3) which was inspired
by
Francis Bacon's
Advancement of Knowledge. The three main branches of
knowledge are: "Memory"/History, "Reason"/Philosophy, and
"Imagination"/Poetry. Notable is the fact that theology is
ordered under 'Philosophy'.
Robert Darnton argues that this categorisation of religion
as being subject to human reason and not a source of knowledge
in and of itself, was a significant factor in the controversy
surrounding the work. Additionally, notice that 'Knowledge of
God' is only a few nodes away from 'Divination'
and 'Black
Magic'.
Influence
The Encyclopédie played an important role in the
intellectual ferment leading to the
French Revolution. "No encyclopaedia perhaps has been of
such political importance, or has occupied so conspicuous a
place in the civil and literary history of its century. It
sought not only to give information, but to guide opinion,"
wrote the
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. In The Encyclopédie
and the Age of Revolution, a work published in conjunction
with a 1989 exhibition of the Encyclopédie at the
University of California, Los Angeles, Clorinda Donato writes
the following:
The encyclopedians successfully argued and marketed
their belief in the potential of reason and unified
knowledge to empower human will and thus helped to shape
the social issues that the French Revolution would
address. Although it is doubtful whether the many
artisans, technicians, or laborers whose work and
presence and interspersed throughout the Encyclopédie
actually read it, the recognition of their work as equal
to that of intellectuals, clerics, and rulers prepared
the terrain for demands for increased representation.
Thus the Encyclopédie served to recognize and
galvanize a new power base, ultimately contributing to
the destruction of old values and the creation of new
ones (12).
But note
Frank Kafker, who explains that the Encyclopedists were not
a unified group[5]
despite their reputation, [the Encyclopedists] were not
a close-knit group of
radicals intent on subverting the Old Regime in
France. Instead they were a disparate group of men of
letters, physicians, scientists, craftsmen and scholars
... Even the small minority who were persecuted for
writing articles belittling what they viewed as
unreasonable customs—thus weakening the might of the
Catholic Church and undermining that of the monarchy—did
not envision that their ideas would encourage a
revolution.
While it is debatable that the editors intended to have a
radical influence on
French society, it can hardly be denied that it did. The
Encyclopédie denied that the teachings of the
Catholic Church could be treated as authoritative in matters
of science. The editors also refused to treat the decisions of
political powers as definitive in intellectual or artistic
questions. Given that
Paris
was the intellectual capital of
Europe at the time and that many European leaders used
French as their administrative language, these ideas had the
capacity to spread.[4]
Contributors
Notable contributors to the Encyclopédie including
their area of contribution (for a more detailed list, see
French Encyclopédistes):
 |
Jean le Rond d'Alembert — editor; science (esp.
mathematics), contemporary affairs, philosophy, religion,
among others
|
|
André Le Breton — chief publisher; printer's ink
article
|
|
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac — philosophy
|
|
Daubenton — natural history
|
|
Denis Diderot — chief editor; economics, mechanical
arts, philosophy, politics, religion, among others
|
|
Baron d'Holbach — science (chemistry, mineralogy),
politics, religion, among others
|
|
Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt — economics, literature,
medicine, politics, among others
|
|
Montesquieu — part of the "goût" article (English:
concept of taste)
|
|
François Quesnay — Farmers and Grains
article
|
|
Jean-Jacques Rousseau — music, political theory
|
|
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune — economics,
etymology, philosophy, physics
|
|
Voltaire — history, literature, philosophy |
Statistics
Approximate size of the Encyclopédie:
| 17 volumes of articles, issued from 1751 to 1765
|
| 11 volumes of illustrations, issued from 1762 to 1772
|
| 18,000 pages of text
|
| 75,000 entries
 | 44,000 main articles
|
| 28,000 secondary articles
|
| 2,500 illustration indices |
|
| 20,000,000 words in total |
Print run: 4,250 copies (note: even single-volume works in
the 18th Century seldom had a print run of more than 1,500
copies)
Quotes
| "Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the
Christian... Other men walk in darkness; the philosopher,
who has the same passions, acts only after reflection; he
walks through the night, but it is preceded by a torch. The
philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of
particular observations. He does not confuse truth with
plausibility; he takes for truth what is true, for forgery
what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable
what is probable. The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit
of observation and accuracy." (Philosophers article,
Dumarsais) |
| "If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the
financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there
would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the
means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of
citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed;
extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare."
(Wealth article, Diderot) |
[edit]
References
- ^
Denis Diderot as quoted in Lynn Hunt, R. Po-chia Hsia,
Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, and Bonnie G. Smith,
The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures: A Concise
History: Volume II: Since 1340, Second Edition (Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007), 611.
- ^
a
b Bryan Magee. The Story of
Philosophy. DK Publishing, Inc., New York: 1998. page
124
- ^
Philipp Blom (2005). Enlightening the World. pp.
35-37
- ^
a
b Bryan Magee. The Story of
Philosophy. DK Publishing, Inc., New York: 1998. page
125
- ^
The Camargo Foundation : Fellow Project Details
[edit]
External links
|
On-line version in original
French
|
|
On-line version with an
English interface and the
dates of publication
|
|
Encyclopédie collaborative translation project,
currently contains a rather small but growing collection of
articles translated into English (654 articles as of May 26,
2009).
|
|
The Encyclopedie, discussion on the
BBC Radio 4 programme
In Our Time, broadcast on
26 October
2006. With Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in
English at Royal Holloway, University of London, Caroline
Warman, Fellow and Tutor in French at Jesus College, Oxford,
David Wootton, Anniversary Professor of History at the
University of York, and presented by
Melvyn Bragg.
|
|
Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des
arts et des métiers on French Wikisource |
