Modern philosophy is philosophy developed
in the modern era and associated with modernity.
It is not a specific doctrine or school (and
thus should not be confused with Modernism),
although there are certain assumptions common
to much of it, which helps to distinguish
it from earlier philosophy.
The 17th and early 20th centuries roughly
mark the beginning and the end of modern philosophy.
How much of the Renaissance should be included
is a matter for dispute; likewise modernity
may or may not have ended in the twentieth
century and been replaced by postmodernity.
How one decides these questions will determine
the scope of one's use of "modern philosophy."
== Modern Western philosophy ==
How much of Renaissance intellectual history
is part of modern philosophy is disputed:
the Early Renaissance is often considered
less modern and more medieval compared to
the later High Renaissance.
By the 17th and 18th centuries the major figures
in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics
were roughly divided into two main groups.
The "Rationalists," mostly in France and Germany,
argued all knowledge must begin from certain
"innate ideas" in the mind.
Major rationalists were Descartes, Baruch
Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Nicolas Malebranche.
The "Empiricists," by contrast, held that
knowledge must begin with sensory experience.
Major figures in this line of thought are
John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume
(These are retrospective categories, for which
Kant is largely responsible.)
Ethics and political philosophy are usually
not subsumed under these categories, though
all these philosophers worked in ethics, in
their own distinctive styles.
Other important figures in political philosophy
include Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
In the late eighteenth century Immanuel Kant
set forth a groundbreaking philosophical system
which claimed to bring unity to rationalism
and empiricism.
Whether or not he was right, he did not entirely
succeed in ending philosophical dispute.
Kant sparked a storm of philosophical work
in Germany in the early nineteenth century,
beginning with German idealism.
The characteristic theme of idealism was that
the world and the mind equally must be understood
according to the same categories; it culminated
in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
who among many other things said that "The
real is rational; the rational is real."
Hegel's work was carried in many directions
by his followers and critics.
Karl Marx appropriated both Hegel's philosophy
of history and the empirical ethics dominant
in Britain, transforming Hegel's ideas into
a strictly materialist form, setting the grounds
for the development of a science of society.
Søren Kierkegaard, in contrast, dismissed
all systematic philosophy as an inadequate
guide to life and meaning.
For Kierkegaard, life is meant to be lived,
not a mystery to be solved.
Arthur Schopenhauer took idealism to the conclusion
that the world was nothing but the futile
endless interplay of images and desires, and
advocated atheism and pessimism.
Schopenhauer's ideas were taken up and transformed
by Nietzsche, who seized upon their various
dismissals of the world to proclaim "God is
dead" and to reject all systematic philosophy
and all striving for a fixed truth transcending
the individual.
Nietzsche found in this not grounds for pessimism,
but the possibility of a new kind of freedom.
19th-century British philosophy came increasingly
to be dominated by strands of neo-Hegelian
thought, and as a reaction against this, figures
such as Bertrand Russell and George Edward
Moore began moving in the direction of analytic
philosophy, which was essentially an updating
of traditional empiricism to accommodate the
new developments in logic of the German mathematician
Gottlob Frege.
=== Renaissance philosophy ===
Renaissance humanism emphasized the value
of human beings (see Oration on the Dignity
of Man) and opposed dogma and scholasticism.
This new interest in human activities led
to the development of political science with
The Prince of Niccolò Macchiavelli.
Humanists differed from Medieval scholars
also because they saw the natural world as
mathematically ordered and pluralistic, instead
of thinking of it in terms of purposes and
goals.
Renaissance philosophy is perhaps best explained
by two propositions made by Leonardo da Vinci
in his notebooks:
All of our knowledge has its origins in our
perceptions
There is no certainty where one can neither
apply any of the mathematical sciences nor
any of those which are based upon the mathematical
sciences.In a similar way, Galieo based his
scientific method on experiments but also
developed mathematical methods for application
to problems in physics.
These two ways to conceive human knowledge
formed the background for the principle of
Empiricism and Rationalism respectively.
==== Renaissance philosophers ====
Pico della Mirandola
Nicolas of Cusa
Giordano Bruno
Galileo Galilei
Niccolò Macchiavelli
Francisco Suárez
=== Rationalism ===
Modern philosophy traditionally begins with
René Descartes and his dictum "I think, therefore
I am".
In the early seventeenth century the bulk
of philosophy was dominated by Scholasticism,
written by theologians and drawing upon Plato,
Aristotle, and early Church writings.
Descartes argued that many predominant Scholastic
metaphysical doctrines were meaningless or
false.
In short, he proposed to begin philosophy
from scratch.
In his most important work, Meditations on
First Philosophy, he attempts just this, over
six brief essays.
He tries to set aside as much as he possibly
can of all his beliefs, to determine what
if anything he knows for certain.
He finds that he can doubt nearly everything:
the reality of physical objects, God, his
memories, history, science, even mathematics,
but he cannot doubt that he is, in fact, doubting.
He knows what he is thinking about, even if
it is not true, and he knows that he is there
thinking about it.
From this basis he builds his knowledge back
up again.
He finds that some of the ideas he has could
not have originated from him alone, but only
from God; he proves that God exists.
He then demonstrates that God would not allow
him to be systematically deceived about everything;
in essence, he vindicates ordinary methods
of science and reasoning, as fallible but
not false.
==== Rationalists ====
Christian Wolff
René Descartes
Baruch Spinoza
Gottfried Leibniz
=== Empiricism ===
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge which
opposes other theories of knowledge, such
as rationalism, idealism and historicism.
Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes (only
or primarily) via sensory experience as opposed
to rationalism, which asserts that knowledge
comes (also) from pure thinking.
Both empiricism and rationalism are individualist
theories of knowledge, whereas historicism
is a social epistemology.
While historicism also acknowledges the role
of experience, it differs from empiricism
by assuming that sensory data cannot be understood
without considering the historical and cultural
circumstances in which observations are made.
Empiricism should not be mixed up with empirical
research because different epistemologies
should be considered competing views on how
best to do studies, and there is near consensus
among researchers that studies should be empirical.
Today empiricism should therefore be understood
as one among competing ideals of getting knowledge
or how to do studies.
As such empiricism is first and foremost characterized
by the ideal to let observational data "speak
for themselves", while the competing views
are opposed to this ideal.
The term empiricism should thus not just be
understood in relation to how this term has
been used in the history of philosophy.
It should also be constructed in a way which
makes it possible to distinguish empiricism
among other epistemological positions in contemporary
science and scholarship.
In other words: Empiricism as a concept has
to be constructed along with other concepts,
which together make it possible to make important
discriminations between different ideals underlying
contemporary science.
Empiricism is one of several competing views
that predominate in the study of human knowledge,
known as epistemology.
Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience
and evidence, especially sensory perception,
in the formation of ideas, over the notion
of innate ideas or tradition in contrast to,
for example, rationalism which relies upon
reason and can incorporate innate knowledge.
==== Empiricists ====
John Locke
George Berkeley
David Hume
Francis Bacon
=== Political philosophy ===
Political philosophy is the study of such
topics as politics, liberty, justice, property,
rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal
code by authority: what they are, why (or
even if) they are needed, what, if anything,
makes a government legitimate, what rights
and freedoms it should protect and why, what
form it should take and why, what the law
is, and what duties citizens owe to a legitimate
government, if any, and when it may be legitimately
overthrown—if ever.
In a vernacular sense, the term "political
philosophy" often refers to a general view,
or specific ethic, political belief or attitude,
about politics that does not necessarily belong
to the technical discipline of philosophy.
==== By country ====
United Kingdom
Thomas Hobbes
John Locke
John Stuart Mill
Jeremy Bentham
James Mill
France
Montesquieu
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Voltaire
Italy
Cesare Beccaria
Giambattista Vico
Giuseppe Mazzini
Germany
Karl Marx
Friedrich Engels
=== Idealism ===
Idealism refers to the group of philosophies
which assert that reality, or reality as we
can know it, is fundamentally a construct
of the mind or otherwise immaterial.
Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a
skepticism about the possibility of knowing
any mind-independent thing.
In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes
how human ideas—especially beliefs and values—shape
society.
As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes
further, asserting that all entities are composed
of mind or spirit.
Idealism thus rejects physicalist and dualist
theories that fail to ascribe priority to
the mind.
An extreme version of this idealism can exist
in the philosophical notion of solipsism.
==== Idealist philosophers ====
Immanuel Kant
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Arthur Schopenhauer
Francis Herbert Bradley
=== 
Existentialism ===
Existentialism is generally considered to
be the philosophical and cultural movement
which holds that the starting point of philosophical
thinking must be the individual and the experiences
of the individual.
Building on that, existentialists hold that
moral thinking and scientific thinking together
do not suffice to understand human existence,
and, therefore, a further set of categories,
governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary
to understand human existence.
==== Existential philosophers ====
Søren Kierkegaard
Friedrich Nietzsche
Jean-Paul Sartre
Simone de Beauvoir
Karl Jaspers
Gabriel Marcel
Martin Heidegger
=== 
Phenomenology ===
Phenomenology is the study of the structure
of experience.
It is a broad philosophical movement founded
in the early years of the 20th century by
Edmund Husserl, expanded upon by a circle
of his followers at the universities of Göttingen
and Munich in Germany.
The philosophy then spread to France, the
United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts
far removed from Husserl's early work.
==== Phenomenological philosophers ====
Edmund Husserl
Martin Heidegger
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Max Scheler
=== Pragmatism ===
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered
on the linking of practice and theory.
It describes a process where theory is extracted
from practice, and applied back to practice
to form what is called intelligent practice.
Important positions characteristic of pragmatism
include instrumentalism, radical empiricism,
verificationism, conceptual relativity, and
fallibilism.
There is general consensus among pragmatists
that philosophy should take the methods and
insights of modern science into account.Charles
Sanders Peirce (and his pragmatic maxim) deserves
most of the credit for pragmatism, along with
later twentieth century contributors William
James and John Dewey.
==== Pragmatist philosophers ====
Charles Sanders Peirce
William James
John Dewey
Richard Rorty
=== Analytic philosophy ===
Analytic philosophy came to dominate English-speaking
countries in the 20th century.
In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada,
Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand, the
overwhelming majority of university philosophy
departments identify themselves as "analytic"
departments.
The term generally refers to a broad philosophical
tradition characterized by an emphasis on
clarity and argument (often achieved via modern
formal logic and analysis of language) and
a respect for the natural sciences.
==== Analytic philosophers ====
Rudolf Carnap
Gottlob Frege
George Edward Moore
Bertrand Russell
Moritz Schlick
Ludwig Wittgenstein
== Modern Asian philosophy ==
Various philosophical movements in Asia arose
in the modern period including:
New Confucianism
Maoism
Buddhist modernism
Kyoto school
Neo-Vedanta
== Notes ==
== External links ==
Media related to Modern philosophy at Wikimedia
Commons
Modern philosophy at the Indiana Philosophy
Ontology Project
