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Modern Philosophy

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Epistemology

Epistemology

  • Epistemology was divided between the Continental Rationalists (Descartes) and the English Empiricists (Locke and Kant)
  • For the Rationalists our minds point us to the reality of ideas.
  • For the Empiricists our minds process the complicated reality we perceive through experience.
  • In the end, most of us have been shaped by some Kantian understanding of experience as shaped by the limits of the mind.

Metaphysics

Metaphysics

  • The universe is made up of orderly laws of nature (Newtonian Physics).
  • Although we can see and experience the phenomena, we cannot know with certainty the noumena.
  • Although there were some forms of pantheism (or panentheism) articulated, for the most part philosophers tended to adhere to some form of Deism.

Political

Philosophy

Political Philosophy

  • Governments are not divinely mandated but are formed through a social contract with the people.
  • For Hobbes, the state of nature is violent and so the government should be given a broad range of powers in order to sustain peace.
  • For Locke, the state of nature is peace, and so the role of the government is limited to the protection of inalienable rights.

Aesthetics

Aesthetics

  • For the most part, the aesthetics of modernity are perceived as rather boring... Art was primarily viewed as representational and instructive.
  • Architecture tended to honor and reflect the adoration of ancient Greek and Roman societies.

Ethics

Ethics

In modernity older forms of ethics, in particular Aristotelian forms of virtue ethics or religious forms of divine command ethics were set aside for the more "rational" models of utilitarianism or the categorical imperative.

Utilitarianism

Categorical Imperative

Act as you would want all other people to act towards all other people. Act according to the maxim that you would wish all other rational people to follow, as if it were a universal law.

Emotivism

Although it would not be fully articulated until the early 20th century, there are hints in the works of people like David Hume that any moral requirement is not based in anything material or "real" but is simply the expression of a person's or a culture's personal feelings. Thus, ethics is nothing more than the articulation of emotion.

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