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| David Hume 1711-1776 |
Just as Science appeared to have gained the upper-hand, something unexpected occured in the world of thought. Starting with
Descarte', on the assumption of Cogito Ergo Sum, a young philosopher took the question of experience to a new level.
What followed was the great riddle of Hume.
Hume supposed, the most obvious point is a negative one: causal reasoning can never be justified rationally. In
order to learn, we must suppose that our past experiences bear some relevance to present and future cases. But although we
do indeed believe that the future will be like the past, the truth of that belief is not self-evident. In fact, it is always
possible for nature to change, so inferences from past to future are never rationally certain. Thus, on Hume's view, all beliefs
in matters of fact are fundamentally non-rational.
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| Mary Wollstonecraft 1759-1797 |
This new concept led to a divide in the world of Ideas, although in truth the divide had existed from the
beginnings of philosophic debate in the arguments of Parmenides and Herclatius. The new classifications were distinguished
now as the British school, and the Continental school. The Former arguing that truth could only be found through the
world of experience, the latter that it was attained through the development of abstract reasoning.
Champions for the British School included Economist Adam Smith, and the Mother of the Feminist movement Mary Wollstonecraft.
Leaders of the Continental movement included the rationalist Leibniz and Rosseau who argued that since perfect freedom
is the natural condition of human beings, it is the existence of social restrictions that requires explanation. Only the family
is truly a natural association, and its features are commonly extended far beyond the basic needs from which it arises. Military
conquest and slavery in its usual forms cannot establish any genuine right for one person to rule over another. So, Rousseau
concluded, society must devolve from a social contract in which individual citizens voluntarily
participate.
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| Immanuel Kant 1724-1804 |
Into the debate entered the most prominent philosopher of the period, a neo-platonist by the name of Immanuel
Kant.
Kant's aim was to move beyond the traditional dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism. The rationalists
had tried to show that we can understand the world by careful use of reason; this guarantees the indubitability of our knowledge
but leaves serious questions about its practical content. The empiricists, on the other hand, had
argued that all of our knowledge must be firmly grounded in experience; practical content is thus secured, but it turns out
that we can be certain of very little. Both approaches have failed, Kant supposed, because both are premised on the same mistaken
assumption.
Progress in philosophy, according to Kant, requires that we frame the epistemological problem in an entirely different
way. The crucial question is not how we can bring ourselves to understand the world, but how the world comes to be understood
by us. Instead of trying, by reason or experience, to make our concepts match the nature of objects, Kant held, we must allow
the structure of our concepts to shape our experience of objects. This is the purpose of Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason (1781, 1787): to show how reason determines the conditions under which experience and knowledge
are possible.
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| Crowning of Napoleon |
After Kant, the continentalist took the mantle of ideas. At the forefront was the question now of Napoleon, who's
tyranny had literaly transformed the scape of the world. Entering the scene was the master poet Goethe, and musician Beethoven.
The romanticist movement looked to nature, and the inherit darkside of mankind as sources of inspiration. It was truly a time
of revolution.
One of the more prominent leaders in the world of Ideas was Hegel who believed that the study of logic is an investigation
into the fundamental structure of reality itself. According to Hegel, all logic (and, hence, all of reality) is
dialectical in character. As Kant had noted in the Antinomies, serious thought about one general description of the world
commonly leads us into a contemplation of its opposite. But Hegel did not suppose this to be the end of the matter; he made
the further supposition that the two concepts so held in opposition can always be united by a shift to some higher level of
thought. Thus, the human mind invariably moves from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, employing each synthesis as
the thesis for a new opposition to be transcended by yet a higher level, continuing in a perpetual waltz of intellectual achievement.
The unifying factor in this period of philisophical thought was the emergence of a new middle class of people
that would make up the modern world. The question was to what end would they find. This led to many new looks into the orginization
of this new society, and this included the economic development of this new culture.
To this debate, Marx argued that workers create products by mixing their own labor in with natural resources to
make new, composite things that have greater economic value. Thus, the labor itself is objectified, its worth turned into
an ordinary thing that can be bought and sold on the open market, a mere commodity.
Workers in a capitalistic economic system become trapped in a vicious circle: the harder they work, the more resources
in the natural world are appropriated for production, which leaves fewer resources for the workers to live on, so that they
have to pay for their own livelihood out of their wages, to earn which they must work even harder. When the very means of
subsistence are commodities along with labor, their is no escape for the "wage slave."
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| Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900 |
In the meanwhile, another philosophy was forming, by the name of Nihilism. In this, Nietzche declared that all
the gods were dead, cut down by our steely knives.
To Nietzche the will to survive was not enough, our true nature was the will to power. If evolution was true,
then only the strongest would endure, and so it was in our nature to strike down all those that weaker than ourselves, It
was a philosophy that showed a bleak future for the world that was soon to follow.
As Marx pointed to the stagnation of the market as result of overproduction, Nietzche looked at the orgy of violence
soon to pass in the great wars.
As the industrial revolution found itself racing into a new era, the new motto of the age was
the concept of pragmatism. In this theory, brought about by William James, truth was a matter of convenience. If it worked,
it must be true.
Thus the relativism of the modern age was at last realized. Truth was to be found in the eye of the beholder.
Right was to be determined by the will of those in power.
Thus the world exploded into a new age
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