ASOIU, PHILOSOPHY COURSE INSTRUCTOR: ZIYA SAMEDLI

Lecture N 5. Modern period philosophy

CONTENTS:
1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. Early Modern Philosophy
3.1. The Empiricism of Francis Bacon
3.2. The Materialism of Thomas Hobbes
3.3. The Rationalism of Rene Descartes
3.4. The Rationalism of Benedict de Spinoza
3.5. The Rationalism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
4. Enlightenment Philosophy
4.1. Sources and Development of Enlightenment Thought
4.2. Classical British Empiricism (epistemological)
4.3. Non-epistemological Movements
4.3.1. Materialism and Scientific Discovery
4.3.2. Social and Political Philosophy
5. The 19th Century philosophy
5.1. German Idealism
5.2. Social and Political Theory
5.2.1. The Positivism of Auguste Comte
5.2.2. The Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill
5.2.3. Karl Marx
5.3. Independent and Irrationalist Movements
6. Conclusion.
Bibliography:
1. Dr. Biju, Modern Western Philosophy, Study Material School of Distance Education
2. For the history of ideas covering the period from the Cartesians to the philosophes, see Paul Hazard, The European Mind: 1680–1715, tr. J.L.May, reissued
London, 1973.
3. Frank Thilly, A History of Philosophy, Allahabad: Central Book Publishing.
4. Frederic Copleston, A History of Philosophy, London: Search Press.
5. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. with introduction by Michael Oakeshott, Oxford, 1947.
6. John Shand, Philosophy and Philosophers, U CL Press.
7. Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Everyman edn.
8. Spinoza, Political Works, tr. and ed. A.G.Wernham, Oxford, 1958.
9. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. with an introduction by Michael Oakeshott, Oxford, 1947.
10. Y Maish, A Critical History of Western Philosophy, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas.
1. Introduction
The modern period of philosophy spans from 1600 to 1900 Centuries. However, time is no clear-cut
demarcation between a period and a Contemporary time. Modern period philosophy can be divided into 3
broad phases: Early Modern Philosophy, Enlightenment philosophy, the 19th Century philosophy. Each of
these phases made a distinctive contribution to the whole corpus of Modern Philosophy.
2. Objectives
The aim of this unit is to give highlight the philosophical trend of thought that characterized what is
generally referred to as the Modern period.
3. Early Modern Philosophy.
The contrast between empiricism (the view that human knowledge ultimately originates in or is
justified by experience) and rationalism (the view that human knowledge ultimately originates in or is
justified by reason) 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).
The earliest empiricist philosophers of the modern period were Francis Bacon and the English
materialist Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). The great rationalist philosophers were Rene Descartes, the
Dutch-Jewish thinker Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77), and the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz (1646–1714).
3.1. The empiricism of Francis Bacon.
Sir Francis Bacon was the outstanding apostle of early modern empiricism. Less an original
metaphysician or cosmologist than the advocate of a vast new program for the advancement of learning
and the reformation of the scientific method, Bacon conceived of philosophy as a new technique of
reasoning that would reestablish natural science on a firm foundation.
In the first book of Novum Organum, Bacon discusses the causes of human error in the pursuit of
knowledge. Aristotle had discussed logical fallacies, commonly found in human reasoning, but Bacon was
original in looking behind the forms of reasoning to underlying psychological causes. He invented the
metaphor of “idol” to refer to such causes of human error.
Bacon distinguishes four idols or main varieties of proneness to error.
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 The idols of the tribe are certain intellectual faults that are universal to humankind. One, for example, is a tendency
toward oversimplification—that is, supposing, for the sake of tidiness. Another is a propensity to be overly influenced
by particularly sudden or exciting occurrences that are unrepresentative
 The idols of the cave are the intellectual peculiarities of individuals. One person may concentrate on the likenesses,
another on the differences, between things. One may fasten on detail, another on the totality.
 The idols of the marketplace are the kinds of error for which language is responsible. Language, like other human
achievements, partakes of human imperfections. Bacon was concerned, with critics of language, with the capacity of
words to embroil people in the discussion of the meaningless (as, for example, in discussions of the deity Fortune).
 The idols of the theatre are mistaken systems of philosophy in the broadest, Baconian sense of the term, in which it
embraces all beliefs of any degree of generality.
3.2. The materialism of Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes was a comprehensive thinker within the scope of an exceedingly narrow set of
presuppositions, and he produced one of the most systematic philosophies of the early modern period: an
almost completely consistent description of humankind, civil society, and nature according to the tenets of
mechanistic materialism. Theories that trace all observed effects to matter and motion are called
mechanical.
In Hobbes’s social contract Leviathan (1651), the many trade liberty for safety. Liberty, with its
standing invitation to local conflict and finally all-out war—is overvalued in traditional political
philosophy and popular opinion, according to Hobbes. People should transfer the right to govern
themselves to the sovereign.
3.3. The rationalism of Rene Descartes
The dominant philosophy of the last half of the 17th century was that of the French rationalist
thinker Rene Descartes. In the minds of all later historians, he counts as the progenitor of the modern spirit
of philosophy. Each of the maxims of Leonardo da Vinci, which constitute the Renaissance worldview,
found its place in Descartes: empiricism in the physiological research described in the Discourse on Method
(1637); a mechanistic interpretation of the physical world and human action in the Principles of Philosophy
(1644) and The Passions of the Soul (1649).
Descartes’ metaphysics in essence consisted of three principles:
 To employ the procedure of complete and systematic doubt to eliminate every belief that does not pass the test
of indubitability (skepticism).
 To accept no idea as certain that is not clear, distinct, and free of contradiction (mathematicism).
 To find all knowledge upon the bedrock certainty of self-consciousness, so that “I think, therefore I am”
becomes the only innate idea unshakable by doubt (subjectivism).
A certain dualism between God the Creator and the mechanistic world of his creation, between mind
as a spiritual principle and matter as a mere spatial extension, was inherent in the Cartesian position.
3.4. The rationalism of Benedict de Spinoza
Spinoza’s speculative system was one of the most comprehensive of the early modern period. In
certain respects, Spinoza had much in common with Hobbes: a mechanistic worldview and even a political
philosophy that sought political stability in centralized power. Yet Spinoza introduced a concept of
philosophizing new to the Renaissance; philosophy became a personal and moral quest for wisdom and the
achievement of human perfection.
Spinoza begins by stating a set of definitions of eight terms in The Ethics (1677): self-caused, finite of
its kind, substance, attribute, mode, God, freedom, and eternity. These definitions are followed by a series of
axioms, one of which supposedly guarantees that the results of Spinoza’s logical demonstrations will be true
about reality.
3.5. The rationalism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
In metaphysics, Leibniz’s pluralism contrasted with Descartes’ dualism and Spinoza’s monism.
Leibniz posited the existence of an infinite number of spiritual substances, which he called “monads,” each
different, each a percipient of the universe around it, and each mirroring that universe from its point of view.
However, the differences between Leibniz’s philosophy and that of Descartes and Spinoza are less
significant than their similarities, in particular their extreme rationalism. In the Principles of Nature and of
Grace Founded in Reason (1714), Leibniz stated a maxim that could fairly represent the entire school: True
reasoning depends upon necessary or eternal truths, such as those of logic, numbers, and geometry, which
establish an indubitable connection of ideas and unfailing consequences.
4.Philosophy in the Enlightenment
The European Enlightenment was an intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which
ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide
assent and instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics. Central to
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Enlightenment thought were the use and celebration of reason, the power by which humans understand the
universe and improve their condition. The goals of rational man were considered to be knowledge,
freedom, and happiness.
4.1. Sources and development of Enlightenment thought
The successful application of reason to any question depended on its correct application—on the
development of a methodology of reasoning that would serve as its guarantee of validity. Such a
methodology was most spectacularly achieved in the sciences and mathematics, where the logic of
induction and deduction made possible the creation of a sweeping new cosmology. At the same time, the
idea of the universe as a mechanism governed by a few simple laws had a stunning effect on the concepts
of a personal God and individual salvation that were central to Christianity.
Inevitably, the method of reason was applied to religion itself. The product of a search for a natural—
rational—religion was Deism, which, although never an organized cult or movement, conflicted with
Christianity for two centuries. For the Deist, a small number of religious truths sufficed, and they were truths
felt to be manifest to all rational beings: the existence of one God, often conceived of as architect, the
existence of a system of rewards and punishments administered by that God, and the obligation to be
virtuous and pious. Beyond the natural religion of the Deists lay the more radical products of the
application of reason to religion: skepticism, atheism, and materialism
The Enlightenment produced the first modern secularized theories of psychology and ethics. The
conceptions of society contrasted sharply with the realities of actual societies. Thus the Enlightenment
became critical, reforming, and eventually revolutionary.
Locke and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) in England, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78),
Montesquieu (1689–1755), Voltaire in France, and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) in America all
contributed to an evolving critique of the arbitrary, authoritarian state and to sketching the outline of a
higher form of social organization, based on natural rights and functioning as a political democracy. Such
powerful ideas found expression as reform in England and as a revolution in France (1789) and America
(1775–83).
The Enlightenment expired as the victim of its excesses. The more rarefied the religion of the Deists
became; the less it offered those who sought solace or salvation. The celebration of abstract reason provoked
contrary spirits to begin exploring the world of sensation and emotion in the cultural movement known
as Romanticism.
4.2. Classical British empiricism (epistemological)
Although they both lived and worked in the late 17th century, Isaac Newton and John Locke were
arguably the true fathers of the Enlightenment. Newton was the last of the scientific geniuses of the age, and
his great Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687) was the culmination of the movement that
had begun with Copernicus and Galileo— the first scientific synthesis based on the application of
mathematics to nature in every detail. The basic idea of the authority and autonomy of reason, which
dominated all philosophizing in the 18th century, was, at the bottom, the consequence of Newton’s work.
Two major philosophical problems remained:
 to provide an account of the origins and extent of human knowledge
 and to shift the application of reason from the physical universe to human nature.
The Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), by Locke, was devoted to the first, and the
Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76)—“being an
attempt to apply the method of experimental reasoning to moral subjects”—was devoted to the second.
Whereas the philosophy of the late Renaissance had been metaphysical and for the most part
rationalistic, that of the Enlightenment was epistemological and empiricist. The school of British
empiricism—whose major representatives are Locke, the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–
1753), and Hume—dominated the perspective of Enlightenment philosophy until the time of Kant.
4.3. Non-epistemological movements
Although the school of British empiricism represented the mainstream of Enlightenment philosophy
until the time of Kant, it was by no means the only type of philosophy that the 18th century produced. The
Enlightenment was based on a few great fundamental ideas (such as the dedication to reason, the belief in
moral and intellectual progress, the confidence in nature as a source of inspiration and value, and the
search for tolerance and freedom in political and social institutions), generated many crosscurrents of
intellectual and philosophical expression.
4.3.1. Materialism and Scientific Discovery

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The profound influence of Locke spread to France, where it not only resulted in the skeptical
empiricism of Voltaire but also united with mechanistic aspects of Cartesianism to produce an entire school
of sensationalistic materialism, a combination of materialism and a form of empiricism according to which
sense perception is the only kind of experience from which genuine knowledge derives. This position even
found its way into many of the articles of the great French Encyclopedia, edited by Denis Diderot (1713–
84) and Jean d’Alembert (1717–83), which was almost a complete compendium of the scientific and
humanistic accomplishments of the 18th century.
Foundations were being laid in psychology, social sciences, ethics and aesthetics. The work of Anne-
Robert-Jacques Turgot, baron de L’Aulne (1727–81), Montesquieu in France, Giambattista Vico
(1668– 1744) in Italy, and Adam Smith (1723–90) in Scotland marked the beginning of economics,
politics, history, sociology, and jurisprudence as sciences. Hume, Bentham, and the British “moral
sense” theorists were turning ethics into a specialized field of philosophical inquiry. Anthony Ashley,
Edmund Burke (1729–97), Johann Gottsched (1700–66), and Alexander Baumgarten (1714–62) were
laying the foundations for systematic aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty and taste.
4.3.2. Social and Political Philosophy
Apart from epistemology, the most significant philosophical contributions of the Enlightenment were
made in the fields of social and political philosophy. The two treatises of Civil Government (1690) by
Locke and The Social Contract (1762) by Rousseau proposed justifications of political association
grounded in the newer political requirements of the age. The Renaissance political philosophies of
Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes had presupposed or defended the absolute power of kings and rulers.
But the Enlightenment theories of Locke and Rousseau championed the freedom and equality of citizens.
It was a natural historical transformation.
The 16th and 17th centuries were the age of absolutism; the chief problem of politics was that of
maintaining internal order, and political theory was conducted in the language of national sovereignty.
But the 18th century was the age of the democratic revolutions; the chief political problem was that of
securing freedom and revolting against injustice, and political theory was expressed in the idiom of
natural and inalienable rights.
5. The 19th Century
In the Enlightenment, attention had turned to the character of the mind that had so successfully
mastered the natural world, and rationalists and empiricists had contended for mastery until the Kantian
synthesis. As for the 19th century, however, if one single feature of its thought could be singled out for
emphasis, it might be called the discovery of the irrational. But many philosophical schools were present,
contending with each other in a series of distinct and powerful oppositions: pragmatism against idealism,
positivism against irrationalism, and Marxism against liberalism.
Western philosophy in the 19th century was influenced by several changes in European and American
intellectual culture and society. These changes were chiefly the Romantic Movement of the early 19th
century, which was a poetic revolt against reason in favor of feeling; the maturation of the Industrial
Revolution, which caused untold misery as well as prosperity and prompted a multitude of philosophies of
social reform; the revolutions of 1848 in Paris, Germany, and Vienna, which reflected stark class
divisions and first implanted in the European consciousness the concepts of the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat; and, finally, the great surge in biological science following the publication of work by Charles
Darwin (1809–82) on the theory of evolution.
Romanticism influenced both German idealists and philosophers of irrationalism. Experiences of
economic discord and social unrest produced the ameliorative social philosophy of English utilitarianism
and the revolutionary doctrines of Karl Marx. The developmental ideas of Darwin provided the
prerequisites for American pragmatism.
A synoptic view of Western philosophy in the 19th century reveals an interesting chronology:
 The early century was dominated by the German school of absolute idealism, whose main representatives were
Johann Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–
1831).
 The mid-century was marked by a rebirth of interest in science and its methods, as reflected in the work of
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) in France and John Stuart Mill (1806–73) in England, and by liberal (Mill) and
radical (Marx) social theory.
 The late century experienced the second flowering of idealism, this time led by the English philosophers T.H.
Green (1836–82), F.H. Bradley (1846–1924), and Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), and the rise of American
pragmatism, represented by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and William James (1842–1910). The new
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philosophies of the irrational, produced by the highly idiosyncratic thinkers Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860),
Soren Kierkegaard (1813–55), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), ran through the century in its entirety.
5.1. German idealism
German idealism is a philosophical movement centered in Germany during the Age of
Enlightenment of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant
and is closely linked with the Romanticism movement. It is sometimes referred to as Kantianism. Other
than Kant himself, the main contributors were Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and additionally Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Gottlob
Ernst Schulze, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and Friedrich Schleiermacher.
In general terms, Idealism is the theory that fundamental reality is made up of ideas or thoughts. It
holds that the only thing actually knowable is consciousness (or mental entities) and that we can never
really be sure that matter or anything in the outside world actually exists. The concept of Idealism
arguably dates back to Plato and reached a peak with the pure Idealism of Bishop George Berkeley in the
early 18th Century. The philosophical meaning of idealism is that the properties we discover in objects
depend on the way that those objects appear to us as perceiving subjects, and not something they possess
in ‘themselves’ apart from our experience of them.
The German Idealists, however, were dissatisfied with Berkeley’s rather naive formulation.
Immanuel Kant tried to bridge the two dominant philosophical schools of the 18th Century:
Rationalism (which held that knowledge could be attained by reason alone, a priori), and Empiricism (which
held that knowledge could be arrived at only through the senses, a posteriori).
The problem of knowledge, according to Immanuel Kant, is to explain how some judgments about
the world can be necessarily true and therefore knowable a priori, or independently of experience.
Behind the phenomena of experience, according to Kant, there is a realm of “noumena” (e.g., “things in
themselves”) that is in principle unknowable. Kant’s philosophy, elaborated in the following books -
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Critique of Pure Reason(1787), Critique of Practical
Reason (1788)
Johann Gottlieb Fichte conceived of human self-consciousness as the primary metaphysical fact.
Taking Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason as his starting point, he held that, just as the moral will is the
chief characteristic of the self, it is also the activating principle of the world. According to Fichte (The
Science of Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge (1798)), all being is posited by the ego, which
posits itself.
In general Fichte’s heirs remained unsatisfied with his voluntaristic resolution of the tension
between subject and object, will and experience. Subsequent thinkers also wondered whether his elevation
of the subject to the position of an absolute did not result in an impoverishment of experience.
Hegel’s major works, including, Science of Logic, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and The
Philosophy of Right (1821), all contain detailed and powerful rejoinders to Kantian conceptions of
knowledge, truth, and freedom.
Hegel’s terse formula (“substance must become subject.”) characterized one of his main philosophical
goals: to reconcile classical and modern philosophy. In Hegel’s view, Greek philosophy had attained an
adequate notion of substance yet for historical reasons had fallen short of the modern concept of
subjectivity. Conversely, modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, appreciated the value of
subjectivity as a philosophical starting point but failed to develop an adequate notion of objective truth.
Hegel’s philosophy sought to combine the virtues of both approaches by linking ontology and
epistemology.
In his political philosophy, Hegel argued that substantial ethical life resided in the state. In his view,
the state alone was capable of reconciling the antagonisms and contradictions of bourgeois society.
Schopenhauer’s criticisms of the later German Idealists are seen by some as a sort of ‘back to
Kant’ movement, giving impetus to a Neo-Kantianism movement in the mid-19th and into the 20th
Century, which yielded the Kantian analyses of such German philosophers as Kuno Fischer, Friedrich
Lange, Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Nicolai Hartmann, Ernst Cassier, Wilhelm Windelband,
Heinrich Rickert and Ernst Troeltsch. Also in the mid-19th Century to the early 20th Century, a
movement that became known as British Idealism revived interest in the works of Kant and Hegel. The
leading figures in the movement were T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, J.M.E.McTaggart,
H.H. Joachim, and J.H. Muirhead.
5.2. Social and political theory

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The absolute idealists wrote as if the Renaissance methodologists of the sciences had never existed.
But if in Germany the empirical and scientific tradition in philosophy lay dormant, in France and England
in the middle of the 19th century it was very much alive.
5.2.1. The Positivism of Auguste Comte
The philosopher and social theorist Auguste Comte’s (The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte
(1830–42)) main contribution to positivist philosophy falls into five parts:
 rigorous adoption of the scientific method;
 law of the three stages of intellectual development;
 classification of the sciences;
 conception of the incomplete philosophy of each of these sciences anterior to sociology;
 and synthesis of a Positivist Social philosophy in a unified form.
Comte revealed his conception of the ideal positivist society in his System of Positive Polity (1851–
54). Comte was deeply reactionary in his rejection of democracy, his emphasis on hierarchy and
obedience, and his opinion that the ideal government would be made up of an intellectual elite. But his
ideas influenced such notable social scientists as Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) of France and Herbert
Spencer (1820–1903) and Sir Edward Burnett Taylor (1832–1917) of Britain.
Although Comte did not originate the concept of sociology or its area of study, he greatly extended and
elaborated the field and systematized its content. Comte’s belief in the importance of sociology as the
scientific study of human society remains an article of faith among contemporary sociologists, and the work
he accomplished remains a remarkable synthesis and an important system of thought.
5.2.2. The Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill
A major force in the political and social thought of the 19th century was utilitarianism, the doctrine
that the actions of governments and individuals should be judged simply by the extent to which they
promoted the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.” The founder of the utilitarian school was
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), an English philosopher, economist, and theoretical jurist.
If Bentham’s psychology was naive, that of his disciple James Mill was philistine. Mill postulated an
economic individual whose decisions, if freely taken, would always be in his interest, and he believed that
universal suffrage, along with Utilitarian legislation by a sovereign parliament, would produce the kind of
happiness and well-being that Bentham desired. In his Essay on Government (1828) Mill thus shows a
dogmatic faith in a literate electorate as the means to good government and in laissez-faire economics as a
means to social harmony.
This utilitarian tradition was humanized by James Mill’s son, John Stuart Mill, one of the most
influential mid-Victorian liberals. James Mill had been entirely pragmatic, but his son tried to enhance more
sophisticated values. He thought that civilization depended on a tiny minority of creative minds and the free
play of speculative intelligence.
5.2.3. Karl Marx
Marx became convinced that communism had less to do with “realizing philosophy” than with the
laws of capitalist development. Marx’s revolutionary fervor tended to harm his philosophical reputation in
the West, and his philosophical achievement remains a matter of controversy. But certain Marxian ideas
(some Hegelian in inspiration, some original) have endured. Among these are:
 That society is a moving balance (dialectic) of antithetical forces that produce social change.
 That there is no conflict between a rigid economic determinism and a program of revolutionary action.
 That ideas (including philosophical theories) are not purely rational and thus cannot be independent of external
circumstances but depend upon the nature of the social order in which they arise.
5.3. Independent and irrationalist movements
The end of the 19th century was marked by a flowering of many independent philosophical
movements. Although by then Hegel had been nearly forgotten in Germany, a Hegelian renaissance was
underway in England, led by T.H. Green (1836–82), F.H. Bradley (1846–1924), and Bernard Bosanquet
(1848–1923). Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893) constituted the high-water mark of the rediscovery
of Hegel’s dialectical method. In the United States, a strong reaction against idealism fostered the pragmatic
movement, led by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and William James (1842–1910). Peirce, a
logician, held that the function of all inquiry is to eradicate doubt and that the meaning of a concept consists
of its practical consequences. James transformed Peirce’s pragmatic theory of meaning into a pragmatic
theory of truth. In The Will to Believe (1897), he asserted that human beings have a right to believe even in
the face of inconclusive evidence and that, because knowledge is essentially an instrument, the practical
consequences of a belief are the real test of its truth: true beliefs are those that work. Meanwhile, in Austria,
Franz Brentano (1838–1917), and Alexius Meinong (1853–1920), were developing empirical psychology
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and a theory of intentional objects that were to have considerable influence upon the new movement of
phenomenology.
Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and, later in the 19th century, Nietzsche provided a new, non-rational
conception of human nature. And they viewed the mind not as open to rational introspection but as dark,
obscure, hidden, and deep. Above all, they initiated a new style of philosophizing. Schopenhauer wrote like
an 18th century essayist, Kierkegaard was a master of the methods of irony and paradox, and Nietzsche used
aphorism and epigram in a self-consciously literary manner. For them, the philosopher should be less a
crabbed academician than a man of letters.
Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy returned to the Kantian distinction between appearances and
things-in-themselves, or between phenomena and noumena, to stress the limitations of reason (The World
as Will and Representation (1819)). His belief in the ability of art, particularly music, to afford
metaphysical insight profoundly influenced the aesthetic theories of the German composer Richard
Wagner. His philosophy of the will, as well as his stark view of reason as incapable of grasping the true
nature of reality, had a considerable impact on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Soren Kierkegaard satirized Hegelian rationalism as a perfect example of “the academic in
philosophy”—of detached, objective, abstract theorizing, and system building that was blind to the realities
of human existence and its subjective, living, emotional character. What a human being requires in life, said
Kierkegaard, is not infinite inquiry but the boldness of resolute decision and commitment. The human
essence is not to be found in thinking but in the existential conditions of emotional life, in anxiety and
despair. The titles of three of Kierkegaard’s books—Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety
(1844), and The Sickness unto Death (1849)—indicate his preoccupation with states of consciousness quite
unlike cognition. Kierkegaard’s stress on the forlornness of the human condition, as well as on the absence
of certainty concerning the possibility of salvation, made him an important forerunner of 20th century
existentialism.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s study culminated in a withering critique of Socrates and the Western
philosophical tradition engendered by his method of logical analysis and argumentation—elenchus, or
dialectic. Nietzsche was disturbed by the Enlightenment’s unswerving allegiance to the concept of scientific
truth. In a brilliant early text, On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense (1873), he offered many insightful
observations about the vocation of philosophy that would ultimately find their way into his mature thought
of the 1880s. The will to philosophy, with its pretensions to objectivity, should not be taken at face value,
suggests Nietzsche, for its veil of impartiality, conceals an array of specific biological functions. The
intellect is a practical instrument employed by the human species to master a complex and hostile
environment. Despite pious insistences to the contrary by philosophers, there is nothing sacrosanct about
their vocation.
Nietzsche’s skepticism about the capacities of reason, as well as his belief in the inherent
limitations of predominantly scientific culture, was shared by many late 19th-century thinkers and
writers. One consequence of his wide-ranging influence was the popularity of the concept of “life” as an
antidote to the rise of scientific positivism.
In Germany, an early opponent of this trend, the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), argued
that, whereas the natural sciences aimed to explain all of physical reality in terms of unchanging, general
laws, the “human sciences”, such as history, sought to capture unique individuals or events from the past.
The latter undertaking, therefore, required a different epistemological approach (The Structure of the
Historical World in the Human Sciences).
A similar movement was afoot in France under the inspiration of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whose
philosophy of vitalism sought to contrast the subjective notion of “duration” with the objective conception
of time proper to the natural sciences (Creative Evolution (1907)). In France Bergson’s influence was
greatest among novelists and political theorists.
In Germany, the corresponding school, known as “philosophy of life”, began to take on aspects of a
political ideology in the years immediately preceding World War I. The work of Hans Driesch (1867–
1941) and Ludwig Klages (1872–1956), for example, openly condemned the superficial intellectualism
of Western civilization. In associating “reason” with the shortcomings of “civilization” and “the West,”
“philosophy of life”, spurred many German thinkers to reject intellection in favor of the irrational forces of
blood and life.
6. Conclusion.
7
ASOIU, PHILOSOPHY COURSE INSTRUCTOR: ZIYA SAMEDLI
The generalizations and conclusions in the investigation of the Modern period Western philosophy are
important in terms of the trends of ontological, epistemological, and general philosophical ideas. The
problems, characteristics, and ideas of the Modern period philosophy can be systematized as follows.
a) Problems of ontology in the philosophy of modern times
In the philosophy of modern times, much attention is paid to the problems of being and substance
especially movement, space, and time. The problems of substance and its properties are of interest to all
philosophers of the New Age because the task of science and philosophy led to an understanding of the need
to study the causes of phenomena, their essential forces.
In the philosophy of this period, two approaches to the concept of “substance” appear:
 ontological understanding of substance as the ultimate foundation of being (Francis Bacon);
 epistemological understanding of the concept of “substance”, its necessity for scientific knowledge (John Locke).
b) Features of the epistemology in the philosophy of modern times
The philosophy of modern times made a huge step in the development of the theory of knowledge
(epistemology), the main ones were:
 problems of philosophical scientific method;
 methodology of human cognition of the external world;
 connections of external and internal experience;
 the task of obtaining reliable knowledge: empiricism (F. Bacon) and rationalism (R.
Descartes, B. Spinoza, G. Leibniz).
 the principle of an autonomously thinking subject;
 principle of methodical doubt;
 inductive-empirical method;
 intellectual intuition or rational-deductive method;
 hypothetical-deductive construction of scientific theory;
 development of a new legal worldview, justification and protection of the rights of a citizen
and a person.
c) General philosophical ideas in the philosophy of modern times
The main task of the philosophy of modern times was an attempt to realize the idea of an autonomous
philosophy, free from religious presuppositions; build an integral worldview on reasonable and
experimental grounds, revealed by research on the cognitive ability of a person.
In addition, the philosophy of the New Age was characterized by such features as:
 Mechanism. As a model for building a picture of the world, the ideas of mechanics. All
spheres of being are organized and function following the laws of this science;
 Special interest in the problems of knowledge. In modern times, philosophy approaches
science as closely as possible, continuing to move away from religion and starting to move
away from art, with which it approached during the Renaissance. Naturally, this was due to the
rapid growth in the importance of scientific methods for the culture and socio-economic life of
the time. Therefore, philosophy sought to satisfy the needs of society associated with the
development of methods of natural science knowledge;
 Preference for the metaphysical method. The world was considered a collection of bodies
that exist without changing. This had consequences for the ideas about thinking and the
conceptual apparatus of science and philosophy. If objects do not change, and consciousness
reflects reality, then all concepts are static enough. Therefore, it is necessary to study them
separately from each other.