18 -19 century

TH th

metaphysics
 The Age of Enlightenment (c. 18)
Main features:
1. Reason as the primary source of authority and
legitimacy.
2. Advancement of ideals of liberty, progress, to-
lerance, fraternity, constitutional government,
separation of church and state.
3. Publication of the Encyclopedia (Diderot and
D’Albert)

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Key writings and people:
:
•Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
•Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality (1754)
•Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776)
•Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748)
•Kant’s Critique of pure reason (1787)
•Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697)
•Helvétius's Of the Spirit (1758)
•Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature (1770)

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 The Legacy of Enlightenment
1. Political democratic revolutions of the 18th and
19th centuries.
2. A variety of 19th-century movements, inclu-ding
liberalism, republicanism and neo-classicism.
3. New forms of civil society - clubs, salons, private
academies, lending libraries, and
professional/scientific organizations.
4. A materialistic tradition based on an ethical
system derived solely from a naturalistic account
of human nature.
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 Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789)
His philosophy was materialistic, he attacked
Christianity and religion in general as an impedi-
ment to the moral advancement of humanity:
“The universe, that vast assemblage of every
thing that exists, presents only matter and
motion: the whole offers to our contemplation
nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted
succession of causes and effects”. [System of
Nature] 7
 David Hume (1711-1776)
On epistemology resting on four
assumptions:
1. Thought, knowledge, belief, conception, and
judgment consist in having ideas.
2. All ideas are derived from perceptions of sense
or inner feelings.
3. Every claim that something exists is a factual
claim.
4. Factual claims can be established by obser-
vation or by causal inference from the observed.
 On the problem of self:
1. We have no knowledge of self: we don’t
really have even an idea of the mind, if the mind
is an unchanging nonmaterial substance.
2. Our ideas can’t go beyond our impressions,
and we have no impressions of the mind, except
perhaps as a bundle of impressions.
A treatise of human nature:
“If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that
impression must continue invariably the same, through
the whole course of our lives… But there is no impression
constant and invariable.... when I enter most intimately
into what I call myself, I always stumble on some parti-
cular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade,
love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself
at any time without a perception... They are the succes-
sive perceptions only, that constitute the mind”. 9
On cause and effect:
1. Experience reveals no necessary connection
between a cause and an effect.
2. It consists in awareness of the nearness in
space and successsiveness in time of the cause
and effect along with recollection of a constant
conjunction of similar things in past experience.
3. What you see is just a sequence of events:
"necessity is something in the mind, not in the
objects. The effect is different from the cause,
and consequently can never be discovered in it.“
4. The fact that all inference from past and pre-
sent experience rests on an improvable assum-
ption (that the future will resemble the past)
means that much of what we think we know we
 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

1.We do have knowledge of objects that exist

outside the mind, but only insofar as they are
experienceable. About external objects as they
are in themselves we can have no knowledge

2.Human reason can discover categories and

principles that apply absolutely and without
exception to experienceable objects
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3. The mind, imposing form and order, arrange
raw sensation in accordance with them. Thus raw
sensation can qualify as experience.

4. To arrange experience the mind imposes

spatio-temporal forms under which perception
takes shape.

5. Space and time are necessary preconditions of

experience. Sensation provides the content of
perception; space and time provide the form.

6. Further, perceptions must be conceptualized

and unified by reason through cause-and-effect
relationships and other categories (possibility,
necessity, etc). 12
7. For experience to be possible, things must be
apprehended not merely as in space or time but
as conforming to cause-and-effect relationships
as well.

8. It is beyond our capacities to know anything

about things-in-themselves, things as they are
apart from and independent of experience.

9. The old assumption that our ideas, to be true,

must conform to objects outside the mind, must
be replaced with a new assumption that objects
outside the mind must conform to that which the
mind imposes on them in experiencing them.
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 Romanticism
1. It emphasized adventure and spiritual vision in
literature, produced huge symphonies, and
stressed exotic themes in the visual arts.
2. It was largely centered in Germany during the
late 18th and early 19th Century.
3. It stands in opposition to the rationalism and
Empiricism of the preceding Age of reason,
representing a shift from the objective to the
subjective.
4. Late-stage German Romanticism emphasized
the tension between the daily world and the
irrational and supernatural projections of creative
genius.
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 German Idealism
It attempted to achieve a complete and unified
onception of all reality, a conception that gave
meaning to each and every aspect in relationship to
he sum total.

J.G. Fichte F.W.J. Schelling G.W.F.

egel
(1762-1814) (1775-1854) (1770-1831)
 German Idealism

1.They transformed Kant’s epistemological skep-

ticism into metaphysical idealism. If things-in-
themselves are not knowable, then they are
unthinkable, and, thus, they just plain aren't.

2.So thought does not merely categorize reality:

its categories are reality. There cannot be
unknowable things-in-themselves, for everything
that is, is a product of the knowing mind.
.

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 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
1.Reality is not the expression of your thought,
for no person created the world of independent
external things that exist around us.
2.Rather, reality is the expression of infinite or
absolute thought or reason.
3.What is true is not merely that which is thought
of, but that which thinks.
4.Thus what is most real—the Absolute—is
thought thinking of itself.

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5. The objective world is an unfolding of infinite
thought, and the individual mind is the vehicle of
infinite thought reflecting on itself.

6. Reality is not a group of independent particu-

lars or states of affairs but it is an integrated
whole in which each proposition (each state of
affairs) is logically connected with all the rest; the
only thing that is totally true is the complete sys-
tem of states of affairs.

7. Thus an isolated state of affairs is not wholly

real; likewise, a proposition about this or that
aspect or feature of reality is only partially true.
The only thing that is totally true is the complete
system. 18
What is Hegel doing
with the dialectic?
He is trying to
“comprehend how
all dimensions of
existence are
dialectically
integrated into one
unitary whole”

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8. So Hegel's system is really a grandiose vision
of the history of the universe and the history of
humanity as a necessary unfolding of infinite
reason.

9. So, the cosmos and its history are the proper

domain of the philosopher, who alone can
understand and interpret the true relationship of
each aspect of reality to the whole and achieve a
complete and unified conception of all reality.

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