1

PAURASTYA VIDYĀPĪTHAM
PONTIFICAL ORIENTAL INSTITUTE OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

VADAVATHOOR, KOTTAYAM – 686010, INDIA

SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

An assignment paper submitted to the Faculty of Philosophy for Partial

Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor in Philosophy

SUBMITTED BY:

KANAMKOMBIL GEORGE

Reg. No: 4180

SUBMITTED TO:

Rev. Dr. MARTIN SANKOORICKAL

Kottayam

February, 2021
 2

1.1 INTRODUCTION

Man is an evolutionary being. It is not only the body but also the human intellect also
subjected to the process of evolution. It was this intellectual evolution led him to a cultural
integrity from a barbarian life style. So, the history of philosophy can be considered as human’s
intellectual evolutionary history. The central theme of attention was different in different
periods of this intellectual evolutionary history. In the modern of western philosophy the man
himself was his matter of discussion. The modern philosophical period extents from the
sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Progress in science and the criticisms of revealed
theology of medieval period formulated a new learning with a broad view of human abilities,
and a systematic understandings of the world. Modernity bestowed the world with three
invaluable gift: enlightment. The medieval philosophy had deep bond to theology, but the
modern philosophy developed the philosophical method, formation of philosophical systems
and humanism. The modern western philosophy flourished with philosophical traditions of
Rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, and Empiricism of Locke, Berkeley and Hume.
The modern western philosophy has further carried by transcendentalism of Immanuel Kant
and of Hegel’s Absolute.1 This article tries to reveal the real spirit of modern philosophy.

1.2 THE RISE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The history has its continuity. There is nothing as an island in the history. The tradition
marked out Descartes as the founder of ‘modern’ philosophy. It should not lead us to create a
closed barrier between the thought of the seventeenth century and all that had preceded it and
made it possible. The method of philosophy changed radically as a result of Descartes’
arguments. But much of its content remained the same and they had influenced by what they
had preceded. It should not therefore be regarded as surprising if some modern philosophical
idea can be shown to have been foreseen by the thinkers of the Middle Ages, in their manifold
attempts either to reconcile religion and philosophy or else to divide them.

1.2.1 Period of Dogmatism: Ancient to Medieval

Platonism and Aristotelianism, have disturbed philosophy throughout its history, and it
is to these philosophical schools that almost all medieval controversies in the subject can
ultimately be traced. From Plato and the neo-Platonic tradition the medievals inherited a
cosmology which both justified the belief in a supersensible reality, and at the same time
presented an elevated picture of our ability to gain to access it. The final conversion of Christian

1
Biju Koonathan, Modern Western Philosophy (Malappuram: University of Calicut, 2011), 3.
theologians to Aristotelian ways of thinking led to the rise of that philosophical movement now
known as ‘scholasticism’. The greatest luminary of this movement was St Thomas Aquinas
(1225–1274), who’s Summa Theologica professed to give a complete description of the relation
between man and God, relying only on philosophical reasoning.2

1.2.2 The denial of scholasticism

The triumph of Thomism was short-lived. Its first serious enemy was the humanism of
the early Renaissance. This was accompanied by revolutions in the practice of education. It
tended to take intellectual authority from ecclesiastics and confer it in the hands of courtiers
and literary men. The gradual ascendancy of a spirit of scientific enquiry raised a hostility
towards the ready receiving of theological dogma. Nevertheless, it is clear that between these
periods a change took place in the intellectual climate of Europe that could not but have the
profoundest consequences on the history of philosophy. And two philosophers in particular
stand out both as embodying the new spirit of criticism and as laying down the intellectual
presuppositions of that style of philosophy which we choose to call modern: Francis Bacon and
René Descartes. These two are united by their rejection of traditional authority and their radical
search for method. But in the case of Bacon, it is difficult to see him as the founder of the
modern, rather than a destroyer of the medieval, modes of thought. Nevertheless it is fitting to
conclude this brief summary of historical background with a few remarks about Bacon’s
distinctive contribution to modern philosophy.3

1.2.3 Francis Bacon: a destroyer of the medieval Dogmatism

Sir Francis Bacon (subsequently Viscount St Albans and Lord Chancellor of England)
was born in about 1561 and died, dismissed from courtly offices, in 1626. He was a polymath
and scholar of the highest order, and even had he never engaged in philosophical or scientific
speculation, he would be known through his Essays as one of the great stylists of the English
language. But his distinguished place in intellectual history lies in his exploration of the
fundamental principles of scientific thought, summarized in the Novum Organum (1620).4

In this work Bacon sets out to show the inadequacies of Aristotelian science and of the
barren a priorism which he associated with the traditional Aristotelian logic of the Organon.
He argued that the Aristotelian logic, being purely deductive in character, provides no method
for the discovery of new facts. Instead of Aristotelian science he proposed his method of

2
Roger Scruton, A short history of modern philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1981), 12-13.
3
Roger Scruton, A short history of modern philosophy, 21-22.
4
Roger Scruton, A short history of modern philosophy, 22-23.
3
‘induction’-the postulation of universal laws on the basis of observed instances- and thereby
hoped to promote the ‘true and lawful marriage between the empirical and the rational faculty’.
He introduced conceptions which were later to prove fundamental to scientific thought and
criticised the theory of ‘final causes’ (the theory that the cause of an event might be found in
its purpose), and with it many of the rationalist preconceptions about causation. In place of
these ideas he put forward the notion of causality as the generation of one thing from another,
in accordance with underlying ‘laws of nature’. He argued that science must always aim at
greater and greater universality and abstraction, so ascending ‘the ladder of the intellect’. Only
in the wake of Cartesianism was the nature of Bacon’s thought fully to be appreciated, and by
then the disputes of scholasticism seemed irrevocably distant.5

1.3 A BRIEF HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

The era of modern philosophy which began in 1453 is called the Renaissance.
Renaissance was considered as the leading factor to modernity.6

1.3.1 Renaissance period

Renaissance period is divided into two periods:7

 Humanistic period (1453-1600): The first phase of Renaissance period is known as

Humanistic period. It was in the leadership of Italy. Inspired by the study of the Greek and
Latin classical philosophers the humanistic period flourished.
 Natural Science Period (1600-1690): The second period of the Renaissance is known as
Natural Science Period. All the philosophers of this period deliberately replicated and
adapted the methods and points of view of the natural scientists contemporary with them.
They themselves in some case make contributions to mathematics and the natural sciences.
Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes in England, and Descartes, Spinoza and of Leibnitz on
the continent of Europe are the thinkers of this period.

The publication of Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding in 1690 is considered

as an inauguration of the Enlightenment (1690-1781). Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in Great
Britain and Voltaire and Rousseau in France were the great thinkers in this period. These
philosophers were totally different in their vision from the philosophers of preceding period.
They believe that the proper study of mankind is important in philosophy. They are dynamic

5
F.H. Anderson (ed.), The New Organon and Related Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960),
12- 30.
6
Frank Thilly, A History of Philosophy (Allahabad: Central Publishing House, 1992), 165.
7
William Wright, A History of Modern Philosophy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1996), 22- 27.
4
eradicators of superstition. They holded the individual liberty and the rights of man. The
English Revolution of 1688 was a stimulant to them. Their influence was an incomplete cause
of the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution.8

1.3.2 Idealistic Period

The Idealistic Period is counted from 1781 to 1831. In 1781 Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason was published and the death of Hegel in 1831 is considered as the end of modernity.
All these German philosophers stated that the world is spiritual in nature and they put forward
the expression of a universal Mind or Spirit. Germans then directed the world in the originality
and depth of their philosophical thought. This new point of view was inspiring to poetry and
religion. This led to the birth of a great Romantic age in German literature (Goethe, Schiller
etc.). English poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Tennyson and Browning as well as
he American Emerson express thoughts strikingly similar to the German idealistic
philosophers.9

1.4 INFLUENCES OF RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION

Renaissance and Reformations, the great two reform movements that took place in 15th
and 16th century influenced as a cause for the modern philosophy. Here we are going to see
how these movements influenced the modern philosophy.

1.4.1 Renaissance
The period we know as the Renaissance (roughly the fourteenth through sixteenth
centuries) witnessed the rediscovery of a wide range of classical texts offering alternatives to
Aristotle’s views in natural philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics. The publishing of Dante’s
Divine Comedy is considered as the inauguration of the Renaissance. It cannot be considered
as a sudden awakening of past, but it had a long developmental history.10 Renaissance art and
Renaissance ideas travelled northward as far as Germany and England. The decade beginning
in 1511 can well be regarded as the high point of the Renaissance.11

The Renaissance influenced the various fields of life. The turn to natural language
begins with Renaissance humanism, where interest in language is so deep that it has been
claimed that Renaissance philosophers of language share some of the central philosophical

8
Biju Koonathan, Modern Western Philosophy, 4- 5.
9
Biju Koonathan, Modern Western Philosophy, 4- 5.
10
Donald Rutherford (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Early modern philosophy (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 18.
11
Anthony Kenny, The Rise of Modern Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1.
5
concerns of recent Anglo-American philosophy, particularly turning to language as the main
or only object of analysis and examining language not simply for its own sake, but for the light
it sheds on philosophical problems. Renaissance critics rejected scholastic logic because they
believed it clashed with customary speech.12 The few philosophical achievements of
Renaissance humanism had been in the field of ethics, and in almost every case the inspiration
had been Aristotelian.13 Renaissance philosophers had seen themselves as rediscovering and
re-publicizing the lost wisdom of ancient times. It was Descartes who was the first philosopher
since Antiquity to over himself as a total innovator; as the person who had the privilege of
setting out the truth about man and his universe for the very first time.14 Locke’s system is not
original and is not consistent, as many later critics were to point out. It combines uneasily
elements from post-Renaissance theories of voluntary confederation.15

1.4.2 Reformation
Reformation is the 16th century controversy over the proper interpretation of the
Christian faith.16 Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk, had made a close study of St Paul’s
Epistle to the Romans. This had made him question fundamentally the ethos of Renaissance
Catholicism. He is considered as the leader of reformation.17 Under the influence of the
Protestant Reformation the power of a single religious authority slowly eroded and as the
prestige of the universal Latin language gave way to vernacular tongues. Philosophers became
less and less identified with their positions in the ecclesiastical hierarchy and more and more
identified with their national origins. The intellectual stimulation provided by humanists helped
spark the Reformation, from which, many humanists, including Erasmus 18, recoiled. By the
end of the 16th century, the battle of Reformation and Counter-Reformation had commanded
much of Europe’s energy and attention, while the intellectual life was poised on the brink of
the Enlightenment.19 The outbreak of the Reformation polarized European society along
confessional lines. The paradoxical result that the Christian humanists, who had done so much
to lay the groundwork for religious reform, ended by being suspect on both sides- by the Roman
Catholics as subversives who (as it was said of Erasmus) had laid the egg that [Martin] Luther

12
Donald Rutherford (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Early modern philosophy, 182.
13
Roger Scruton, A short history of modern philosophy, 105.
14
Anthony Kenny, The Rise of Modern Philosophy, 40.
15
Anthony Kenny, The Rise of Modern Philosophy, 293.
16
The Encyclopedia Americana, 316.
17
Anthony Kenny, The Rise of Modern Philosophy, 4.
18
Desiderius Erasmus was a humanists (1469–1536), whose Praise of Folly (1509) epitomized the moral
essence of humanism in its insistence on heartfelt goodness as opposed to formalistic piety.
19
Brian Duignan (ed.), Modern philosophy: from 1500 Ce to the present (New York: Britannica Educational
Publishing, 2011), 21- 25.
6
hatched and by the Protestants as hypocrites who had abandoned the cause of reformation out
of fearfulness of ambition.20 The intellectual and political structure of Christianity which was
secured in the middle Ages, collapsed due to the assaults made on it by the Protestant
Reformation. The Reformation, more directly but in the long run, challenged the monolithic
authority of the Roman Catholic Church. For the German Reformer Martin Luther as for Bacon
or Descartes, the way to truth lay in the application of human reason.21

1.5 DIFFERENT SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY

The real spirit of modern philosophy is encompassed in the different thinking patterns
of the modern philosophical period. These different thought patterns bring the views on reality
of a great time period. Rationalism, empiricism, materialism are the different schools of
thought which were emerged during the time of modern philosophy. Enlightment put forward
by the Immanuel Kant can be considered as a fruit of modernity.

1.5.1 Rationalism
The main objective of this section is to introduce rationalism especially Descartes’
rationalistic thinking. It helps us to know the method of abstraction as well. In this section we
shall try to understand how Descartes thinking deviate from classical philosophy. The other
rationalist philosophers like Spinoza and Leibnitz developed rationalism which was developed
by Descartes. Rationalism is the view that human knowledge ultimately originates in or is
justified by reason. This theme dominated the philosophical controversies of the 17th and 18th
centuries and was hardly resolved before the advent of the German Enlightenment philosopher
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).22 The rationalists argues that there are certain fundamental
principles of reality. These are innate and recognized as true by reason or intuition. They
consider the deduced knowledge as truths. Intuition is immediate apprehension by reason. The
vague and obscure light of the senses and imagination are rejected by the help of mathematical
method. The simple, clear, self-evident, and innate ideas of reason are only selected. And all
other truths deduce from them.23

In the history of Western Philosophy, Rene Descartes (1596-1650) the first rationalist,
who guides new lines of thought as would clearly mark the beginning of the modern era. It
gave him the title ‘Father and originator of Modern Western Philosophy’ and France’s greatest

20
Brian Duignan (ed.), Modern philosophy: from 1500 Ce to the present, 40.
21
Brian Duignan (ed.), Modern philosophy: from 1500 Ce to the present, 104.
22
Brian Duignan (ed.), Modern philosophy: from 1500 Ce to the present, 75.
23
Richard Falckenberg, History of Modern Philosophy (America: BiblioBazaar, 2006), 103- 104.
7
philosopher. The role of the individual and his reasoning power against the background of
church domination was his point of emphasizing. He states that every individual has the power
to know the truth. He gives emphasize on the influence of mathematics and scientific method.
For Plato, the unity of all sciences in the mystical Idea of the Good. But Descartes, puts forward
the unity of science as a rationalistic and mathematical unity based upon mathematical axioms.
In Aristotelianism, change is teleological and the matter moves towards the actualization of
forms. Descartes explained all change as mechanical, and as the movement of bodies according
to the laws of physics. Descartes was a philosopher, a mathematician, and a man of science.
He used the analytic method, which supposes a problem solved, and examines the
consequences of the supposition. Modern western philosophy has very largely accepted the
formulation of its problems from Descartes, while not accepting his solutions. According to
Descartes, it is through intuition i.e. the natural light of reason, that we come to know the
existence of the self or mental substance and then we gradually deduce the existence of God
and the external material world. Descartes accepts the existence of all these three substances-
mind, matter and God.24 According to Descartes, God’s existence is established by the fact that
Descartes has a clear and distinct idea of God. But the truth of Descartes’s clear and distinct
ideas are guaranteed by the fact that God exists and is not a deceiver. Thus, to show that God
exists, Descartes must assume that God exists.25

1.5.2 Materialism
Logical positivism and naturalized epistemology were forms of materialism.26
Materialism humanizes and exercises a tranquilizing influence on the mind, as the religious
view of the world, with its incitement to hatred, disturbs it; materialism frees us from the sense
of guilt and responsibility, and from the fear of future suffering.27 Thomas Hobbes was one of
the famous among the materialist philosophers. Usually he also follows the empiricistic view,
in a specific way he is included as the proponent of extreme materialism. He finds his mission
in the construction of a strictly mechanical view of the world. Mechanism applied to the world
gives materialism; when it applied to knowledge there arises sensationalism of a mathematical
type. Determinism is the result of the mechanism applied to the will. If mechanism is applied
to morality and the state, it results in ethical and political naturalism. Nevertheless, the
empirical tendency of his nation has a certain power over him; he holds fast to the position that

24
Biju Koonathan, Modern Western Philosophy, 6-7.
25
Brian Duignan (ed.), Modern philosophy: from 1500 Ce to the present, 77.
26
Brian Duignan (ed.), Modern philosophy: from 1500 Ce to the present, 199.
27
Richard Falckenberg, History of Modern Philosophy, 256
8
all ideas ultimately spring from experience.28 His materialistic vision is the basis of his political
theory. Hobbes presented his political philosophy in different forms for different audiences. De
Cive states his theory in what he regarded as its most scientific form. Unlike The Elements of
Law, which was composed in English for English parliamentarians—and written with local
political challenges to Charles I.29 Hobbes’s masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), does not
significantly depart from the view of De Cive concerning the relation between protection and
obedience, but it devotes much more attention to the civil obligations of Christian believers
and the proper and improper roles of a church within a state. Hobbes argues that believers do
not endanger their prospects of salvation by obeying a sovereign’s decrees to the letter, and he
maintains that churches do not have any authority that is not granted by the civil sovereign.30

1.5.3 Empiricism
Empiricism realizes human understanding as restricted within the limits of human
experience. In the middle ages, empiricist theories about causality had already put forward by
William of Ockham. He opinioned about the mind and about the nature and limits of science.
Later these were got wide acceptance. In the late Renaissance too, Francis Bacon had
expressed, in a manner more fulsome than systematic, a theory of knowledge in which the habit
of empirical investigation was given precedence over metaphysics.31 Empiricism is basing
knowledge from the senses. Descartes, the rationalist, rejected empiricism as an inferior way
of knowing. David Hume, the eighteenth century empiricist and skeptic, was taken up this
challenge and responded with more perfect answer. So he is considered as the first empiricist
modern philosopher. Hume’s thinking with the influence of Locke and Berkeley in his thinking
the empiricism attained progressive growth. He was the most mercilessly destructive of all the
British empiricists and he took delight in demolishing the claims of philosophy, shocking the
defenders of religion and undermining the validity of scientific laws and the Enlightenment
belief in progress.32

1.6 CONCLUSION: ENLIGHTMENT

Enlightenment is a movement sprouted in Europe from the beginning of 1650 to 1800.

Enlightenment promoted the use of reason and individualism instead of tradition and
established doctrines.33 The Enlightenment was initiated with the publication of Locke’s Essay

28
Richard Falckenberg, History of Modern Philosophy, 88.
29
Brian Duignan (ed.), Modern philosophy: from 1500 Ce to the present, 85.
30
Brian Duignan (ed.), Modern philosophy: from 1500 Ce to the present, 90.
31
Roger Scruton, A short history of modern philosophy, 79.
32
Biju Koonathan, Modern Western Philosophy, 21.
33
Biju Koonathan, Modern Western Philosophy, 4.
9
on the Human Understanding in 1690.34 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is the most influential
thinker of the Enlightenment period. Because he contributed a conclusion to modern
philosophy and a new direction to the European Enlightenment.35 The philosophical
controversies of the 17th and 18th centuries36 was hardly resolved before the advent of the
German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. The epistemological theories of the
British empiricists led directly to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the true culmination of the
philosophy of the Enlightenment. Kant confessed that Hume had awakened him from his
“dogmatic slumber.”37 The struggle between idealism and materialism lies at the roots of
Kantian enlightenment. Kant’s views on freedom are greatly influenced by the Enlightenment
movement of the time. Kant’s concept of reason and human rationality is another attempt to
justify the claims of Enlightenment.38 According to Kant, Enlightenment is man’s emergence
from his self-incurred immaturity where he fails to use his own understanding without the
guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment, Sapere aude (Dare to think) gives courage
to use our own understanding in contrast with the motto of middle ages, ‘Don’t think, and just
follow orders’.39 The idealistic period in the history of modern philosophy received its spirit
from the enlightment movement. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Kant’s most important
successor, attempted to transcend systematically all the antinomies of Kantian thought. Hegel
is considered as the leading proponent of idealistic period.40

Modern philosophy which was inaugurated by the renaissance and concluded by the
enlightenment was really a great revolutionary shift in the history of western philosophy. Their
enormous contributions have made philosophy as it exists today richer, more historically
informed, and more practically relevant than it has been in any period of its history. Through
this article, it is attempted to introduce the real spirit of modern Western philosophy. The real
spirit of philosophy is the enlightment given by the philosophers. It is appropriate to say that it
is also true in the case of modern western philosophy that it enlightened the people of that
period and also it enlightens even the today’s world.

34
Biju Koonathan, Modern Western Philosophy, 33.
35
Biju Koonathan, Modern Western Philosophy, 36.
36
The debate existed between the rationalists and empiricists about the source of true knowledge is referred
here. Rationalists argued deductive reasoning as the source of true knowledge, while empiricist demanded
sense perception as the source of true knowledge.
37
Brian Duignan (ed.), Modern philosophy: from 1500 Ce to the present, 138.
38
Biju Koonathan, Modern Western Philosophy, 42.
39
Biju Koonathan, Modern Western Philosophy, 46.
40
Brian Duignan (ed.), Modern philosophy: from 1500 Ce to the present, 148.
10