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1. The Empiricism. English philosophy of the 17th century
(Francis Bacon,Hobbes, John Lock),
2. The Rationalism. European philosophy of the 17th century
(R.Descartes, B. Spinoza, Leibniz);
3. French philosophy of the 18th century: Enlightenment,
Encyclopedias, Mechanical materialism.
The fruitful rise of capitalism and bourgeois relationship had changed the world by the 17th century. Europe was divided into national states. Some bourgeois revolutions in England and Netherlands took place.
The development of experimental knowledge demanded the replacement of the scholastic method of thinking by a new one, directly addressed to the real world. The principles of materialism and elements of dialectics were revived and developed, in a new atmosphere. Increasing knowledge of nature confirmed the truth of materialism and rejected the basic propositions of idealism. Although human knowledge of geography (through the accounts of Marco Polo, the voyages of discovery and so on) and of medicine (through discoveries such as that of the circulation of the blood, and the new interests in anatomy both in art and in surgery, etc.) and some other areas expended greatly during this period, it was in the fields of astronomy and mechanics that the largest advances were being made. This had its effects on natural philosophy, where the dominant picture of the physical cosmos was that of the machine. All this raised the issue of the relation of the human soul or mind to the body. This in turn stimulated thinking about how our senses and thoughts can successfully understand what lies "out there". Mind-body dualism could create severe problems in the theory of knowledge. And so it was in the 17th century that there was something of a sea change in the direction and emphasis in philosophical thinking.
The main pecul i arities of the Modern Ages philosophy are as following:
1. Philosophy was guided by science. It was inseparably linked with knowledge taken from experience, practice. The importance of scientific awareness was growing.
2. The problems of epistemology in the new philosophy became as important as onthology problems, even more.
3. The conflict between empiricism and rationalism - two main streams of the 17th century.
4. The growing interest to the social organization. The social contract.
5. The dominant place of materialism (mechanical, metaphysical).
European philosophy manifested rationalism and English - empiricism. These two positions tended to the development of science, formed its character, defined main tendencies of Modern Ages thinking.
The Empiricism is the philosophical position, which absolutizes sensual cognition, and regards that all knowledge derives from sensation on one hand and reflection on the other.
There are two variants of Empiricism: materialistic (Bacon, Hobbes, Lock) and idealistic (Berkley, Hume).
In materialistic Empiricism an actual world is taken as the source of knowledge. In idealistic one experience is considered as a complex of sensations or impressions and the objective world as a base of experience is denied. Probably the greatest theorist of science of empiricism as it was beginning to emerge, was Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam (1561-1624). Much of his life was spent as a statesman, serving Elizabeth I and James I with some distinction and some duplicity. His greatest contributions were his various writings on philosophy and science, notably his “The Advancement of Learning”and the “Novum Organum”. He realized that a new age of scientific knowledge was dawning, with various discoveries and techniques, especially the work of Copernicus and Galileo, the use of the telescope, printing and so forth. He was highly critical of much of the procedures of the teamed world: philosophers were like spiders, spinning forth wonderful systems out of their own bodies with no contact with reality; other empirical inquirers were like ants, acquiring bits and pieces, but not within a systematic framework. Rather, humans should work together with system in order to create knowledge. Bacon ambitiously wished to create a complete classification of existing sciences, a whole new inductive logic, and a new philosophy of nature. He saw humanity as too much dominated by various idols, which could distort and undermine their knowledge. There are the idols of the tribe, that is to say views which seem to have a commonsense basis, but often represent wishful thinking, inherent in the human condition. There are the idols of the den (or cave: he drew the metaphor from Plato), in which we are fooled by our own individual quirks: we ought to be especially suspicious of views which we find congenial. There are the idols of the marketplace, arising from our talking language too seriously - often it creates the illusion of real entities out there when they are linguistic projections. And there are the idols of the theatre, in other words notions which are basically fictional but are given wide currency, because they arise from varying viewpoints, which may have little bearing on reality. Bacon wanted to see science separated from philosophy and both from religion. The inductive logic he sketched was rich. Several of his suggestions were taken up after his death through the foundation of the Royal Society, devoted to scientific research and development. Bacon’s thought breathes a new air. For all the glories of the Renaissance, it was also in part backward-looking. But Bacon pointed the way forward to the systematic and practical development of scientific knowledge. For him the bee, not the spider or the ant, was the right model. He also swung interest towards epistemology. The methods whereby we come to know things became one of the preoccupations of the modem period in philosophy in the West.
Bacon’s materialism was farther developed and defended by English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679).This English thinker was at one time tutor to Charles II of France and later secretary to Fransis Bacon. He professed materialism, seeking to explain everything on the basis of mechanistic principles. He rejected most traditional philosophical concepts as useless abstractions. He considered knowledge to be empirical (i.e. acquiring from observation and experience only) both in origin and results, and regarded the study of bodies and their movements as the only concern of philosophy. He divided philosophy into four sub-sciences:1) geometry (describing the movements of bodies in space); 2) physics (describing the effects of moving bodies on one another); 3) ethics (describing the movements of the nervous system); 4) politics (describing the effects of nervous systems on one another). Thus, his philosophy was devoted to ascertaining the laws of motion. The first law of motion appears in every organic body in its very tendency to movement; in man, the first law of motion becomes the first natural right (the right to self-preservation and self-assertion). This causes all bodies, whether organic or inorganic (men, animals, objects, ideas, etc.) to enter into the primary condition of life - collision and conflict (and war). The second law of motion is a kind of recoil from the condition of collision, and impels bodies (and men) to relinquish their natural right to self-assertion for a similar relinquishment on the part of fellow bodies (and men). Out of these two laws of natural motion there necessarily arise, on the human level, such things as social contracts, which are the basis for the state. Hobbes’ most influential writing was on political philosophy, but his general attitudes to philosophy itself are of interest. First, he wanted rigorously to exclude theology from its purview. Reasoning about God does him no honor. Thought he did not deny him, he asserted that God existed but nobody could say anything about him on the basic of reason.
He was much impressed with his discovery of geometry, both Euclidean and Cartesian. He considered therefore that a great part of philosophy had to do with behavior of bodies as extended things. Indeed for all practical purposes he was a materialist.
Hobbes was nominalist, and saw no merit in the idea of a universal concept or idea. Rather, we wield universal names for sets of individual things which resemble one another. He liked the rationalist idea of science and indeed more generally philosophy as a deductive system: such deductions begin with definitions, in which somewhat arbitrarily we assign precise meanings to basic names. But he was also an empiricist, of a sort - science he considered to be based on sense-experience, yet on the other hand he thought that secondary qualities, such as sounds, are caused in the head by motions of bodies and do not inhere in bodies themselves. But he was not unduly worried by the epistemological consequences of this position. For Hobbes the investigation of causation boiled down to that of motions of bodies. This applies even to psychology, so that pleasure is nothing but motion about the heart, as he said, as conception is nothing but motion in the head.
His materialism enabled Thomas Hobbes to take a dispassionate view of politics. This he considered from the perspective of human nature, as he understood it. Thus, roughly speaking, all humans are equal, in that a weakness can be compensated for by some strength elsewhere, so that humans do not back away from competition with others on the grounds that they are not equal to it. Each person struggles for his own conservation. But humans also worry about self-esteem, so conflict arises between them out of competition, mutual mistrust and the desire for glory. This leads to conflict, either actual or feared - the war of all against all. Unless something is done about it, the life of human is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. In this primordial state of war there is no law and without law no justice, and without that no morals. Though the basic passions for self-preservation and self-esteem incline humans to war, other passions have a countervailing effect - the fear of death, the desire for ample goods, and so forth. So reason inclines people to do something about the basic state of the war.
Enlightened egoism suggests the forming of a government which will regulate civil society. Various laws of nature impel humans: that they will seek peace; be willing to sacrifice a certain amount of liberty against others - each as much as he would allow against himself; and hold to contracts which are made (or contracts become worthless). In making convenants with one another people constitute themselves into a commonwealth in which their power is assigned to a sovereign. Or, alternatively, a sovereign simply takes over this power by acquisition. In either case the commonwealth is formed out of fear, a basic feeling in politics. Once formed it becomes, so to speak, a mortal god Leviathan. The sovereign would not have to be a monarch. Various options, clearly enough, are possible. But on the whole he considered monarchy the best option, because the sovereign is then undivided and is more likely to be strong and rule with sagacity. But the option is open, and the best system would be a matter for empirical determination.
Hobbes’ whole work was challenging to this contemporaries - on the State, on free will (which he denied), on language, the nature of science, on official religion, and so on. He was a major figure in the evolution of British philosophy and the empiricist outlook. But he also had his connection with the French, and especially the Cartesian movement.
Another follower of the empiricism traditions was John Locke (1632-1704) who was educated at Oxford and taught there a while. He studied philosophy but also took a degree in medicine. He served as secretary to a diplomatic mission to the Elector of Brandenburg, and held posts under Lord Shaftesbury, the Lord Chancellor. He lived abroad for a while, and returned after William of Orange came to the throne in 1688. He held minor offices in London, and eventually died in 1704. His main writings were his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” and “Two Treatises of Civil Government” (1690), “Some Thoughts Concerning Education” (1693), “The Reasonableness of Christianity” (1695) and from 1689 his various ”Letters on Toleration”.
British empirical philosopher, he developed a whole political philosophy based on empiricism. He began by denying the existence of eternal categories, principles or ideas from which, allegedly, all our thought is derived. He claimed instead that our knowledge is obtained purely from sense experience and is refined by reflection upon the things that affect the senses. Even seemingly abstract concepts (universals such as substance, cause and effect, etc.) have their causes directly from reflection upon experience - man merely intuits these things. Which is not to say that real knowledge of these universal ideas does not exist; rather, it does not exist for man. Thus, man’s knowledge is limited, and he must function exclusively within the limits of his senses, Locke employed this doctrine in formulating his long-lived political and economic views. He rejected the notion of the divine right of kings, as well as the authority of the Bible and the Church in temporal affairs.
Locke thought that we could know that God exists, not by some perceptual means, but on the basis of a demonstration, which in fact is a variation on the cosmological argument. In addition we can have faith in the truths of revelation, provided they do not run contrary to reason.
Locke advocated within certain bounds, toleration in matters of religion. Torture is no way for the Church to attempt to enforce conformity, and it is a mark of the true Church that it is tolerant. The only means of conversion should be by persuasion. However, Locke did not extend his tolerance as far as atheists, as he thought that they would not think that promises and contracts are binding. Similarly, it is impossible to tolerate those whose very religion puts them at the service of a foreign power.
These are in effect limitations upon his political theory. Like Hobbes he postulated a state of nature and a social contract. But his picture of the original human position is very different from that of Hobbes. In the state of nature human beings have an understanding of the moral law which arises quite independently of the State. Every person has certain rights and due to which are, so to speak, “presocial”. Thus every person has the right to defend herself, and to freedom. Moreover, in a broad sense a person has a right to property.
But though such rights may be in general recognized, it does not in fact follow that they will actually be respected. Inequalities and injustices are possible and typically actual in a presocial condition. And so it is that the social contract comes about. Humans freely give up their legislative and executive rights to one another, in order to create a sovereign power. But this is a very different situation from that envisaged by Hobbes. Sovereignty ultimately resides in the people, and issues in general are to be decided by majority vote. If a sovereign turns against the people and so becomes a tyrant, then the people have the right of rebellion. All this constitutes a scheme for the Justification of democratic forms of government.
Locke’s general political theory became a major basis for the justification of democratic government. In general he was a major figure in the development of British empiricism and equally in the evolution of democratic political theory.
The 17th and 18th centuries in England were marked by the development of idealist sensualism, of which the most prominent proponents were George Berkeley (1685-1753) and David Hume (1711-1776).
A convinced adherent of religion, Berkeley undertook a critique of the notion of matter. Relying, on the one hand, on extreme nominalism (and thus challenging the authority of Thomas Aquinas, who asserted moderale realism in Christianity), and on the other, on a one-sided interpretation of Locke’s sensualism, he considered the concept of matter to be general and therefore false, for underlying it is the assumption that we can ignore the particular properties of things constituting the content of our sensations, and form an abstract idea of matter in general as the substratum common to all of them. However, we perceive not matter as such but only the individual properties of things — taste, smell, colour, etc., of which the perceptions Berkeley called ideas. The things surrounding us exist as ideas in the mind of God, who is the cause and the source of earthly life, Berkeley’s subjective idealism is a logical confusion of religious idealist views and the one-sided elements of nominalism and sensualism. In order to avoid solipsist conclusions from these premisses, Berkeley introduced the concept of collective consciousness, which is determined by God. Here Berkeley relied on realism and even rationalism, but this concession to objective idealism did not change the essence of his doctrine, which remained subjective idealist.
Hume developed a system somewhat different from Berkeley’s but also essentially subjective idealist, directed primarily towards agnosticism. To the question whether the external world existed, Hume gave an evasive answer, "I do not know". He believed that man could not go beyond his own sensations and understand something outside himself. For Hume, true knowledge could only be logical, while the objects of study concerning facts could not be proved logically, being derived from experience. Hume interpreted experience as a flow of impressions whose cause was unknown and unknowable. Inasmuch as experience cannot be logically substantiated, experiential knowledge is unreliable. Thus experience can produce first one impression of a certain phenomenon and then another. But the fact that one phenomenon precedes another in experience cannot logically prove that the former is the cause of the latter. In itself, this proposition is indubitably correct. From this, though, Hume drew the erroneous conclusion that the objective character of causality was unknowable. Rejecting objective causality, he recognized at the same time subjective causality in the form of generation of ideas (memory images) by sense impressions. Eventually Hume lost all criteria of the truth of knowledge and was forced to declare belief rather that theoretical knowledge to be the source of practical certainty. Thus we are practically certain that the sun rises every day. This certainty comes from the habit of seeing this phenomenon repeated every day. Hume applied Berkeleian critique of the idea of Substance not only to matter but also to ideal being, and this developed into critique of the church and religious faith.
The disadvantages of Empiricism are in the following:
1. The exuberation of the importance and role of sensation in epistemology.
2. The underestimation of the value of abstraction in the theory of knowledge.
3. Rejection of the activeness and independence of thinking.
So, Empiricism failed to expose the origin of the universal ideas and came to the complete denial of the existence of the world in its extreme variants.
Another approach in epistemology is manifested by rationalism. Rationalism (from Latin “ratio ”meaning reason - the philosophical position that reason (thought) is the source of knowledge and the criterion of its truth. The theory of rationalism assumed the existence of innate ideas in human mind largely determining the results of cognition. Most of the foundations of mathematics and logic were counted among innate ideas.
The philosopher who placed reason first, reducing the role of experience was French scientist Rene Descartes (1596- 1655). He was born at La Haye, France. After completing his formal education at the Jesuit College at Le Fleche, he spent nine years (1612-1621) in travel and military service. The remainder of his life was devoted to study and writing. He died in Sweden, where he had gone to tutor Queen Christiana. Regarded as one of the founders of modern epistemology, he was the first philosopher to bring mathematical methods to bear on speculative thought. He began by asserting that everything that could not immediately pass his criterion of truth (i.e. the clearness and distinctness of ideas) was worthy of doubt. Anything that could pass this test was to be considered self-evident. From self-evident truths, he was able to deduce other truths which logically followed from them. The first self-evident truth to be discovered, according to him, is that of the thinking self. Since the fact that he thought was the clearest and most distinct idea he could have, he could not doubt that he existed. (This intuition was enunciated in his famous Cogito, ergo sum;("I think, therefore I am")). The other truth that he recognized immediately according to his criterion was God, and he gave a mathematical proof for the existence of God. From these two clear and distinct ideas, he developed a highly elaborated system of thought that spread throughout all divisions of philosophy His impact on the subsequent history of philosophy was considerable. In line with his mathematical interests he wished to propound a cosmology which contained only matter and mathematics. The idea of matter is that of a plenum. Each part of matter excludes every other. Descartes denies the possibility of a void. But in addition to the basic physical matter there are thinking substances, that is to say minds or souls. Of these there are many. But the physical cosmos, as Descartes theory of matter implies, is one infinite and continuous body in three dimensions. Now because of his denial of the void, Descartes sees that motion has to involve the circular displacement of matter: in brief, it occurs in a whole series of vortices. This is the basis of his dynamics. He had a problem with mind, according to this cosmology. As we see, the mind plays a crucial part in the building up of the edifice, of certainty which Descartes wished to achieve. His method of doubt in his “Meditations Method” led inwards to the individual, trying to figure things put for himself. This became a pervasive feature of Western epistemology. But because it was reflective and inward-looking it gave a central part to the mind. He saw the mind as being immortal. As for animals, they do not have souls and are machines. In regard to humans the soul is mysteriously joined to the body.
The method of doubt was an analytic one. Descartes cannot be thought to be a real sceptic. Trying to prove the existence of the external world he found in his mind the idea of a Perfect Being. God, being perfect, cannot be a deceiver, so we can rely on the existence of the outside world. And we can be assured that provided we proceed deliberately and only accept clear and distinct ideas we can build up a sure system of knowledge.
There are three ways in which Descartes did not set modern philosophy and science on a sound path. First, he was not primarily interested in empirical investigations and had too abstract and mathematical vision of the outside world. Second, his method was unadventurous and solipsistic. Third, he hoped to avoid uncertainty while at the same time inviting philosophical debate, for instance on the ontological argument.
Descartes revolutionized philosophy in various ways. First in starting again freshly with reflection he was not highly dependent on tradition. His antiauthoritarianism was refreshing. Second, he was committed to discovering a method in philosophy, and so was the major progenitor of a systematic epistemology. Third, he set European philosophy along the path to introspection.
Spinoza Baruch (1632-1677). One of the relatively few titans of philosophy, he was born in Amsterdam in a Jewish family that had been forced by religious persecution to flee Portugal. His early education in Amsterdam’s Jewish community consisted principally of Biblical and Talmudic studies. Later he learned Latin, studied the natural sciences, and became particularly steeped in the philosophies of Hobbes and Descartes. While in his early twenties he began writing analytical treatises on the Bible that earned him the disapproval of the elders of the Jewish community. He was eventually banned and spent the rest of his life in relative isolation, for the most part studying and writing, while making his living as an optical lens grinder.
Although his chief work is entitled “Ethics”, it could justifiably be called “Metaphysics”, for it is a masterly metaphysical exposition of knowledge and is much more important for its original metaphysical insights than for its ethical conclusions. Using the mathematical method or argument developed by Descartes, he developed his entire philosophy around a conception of nature in which one, eternal, infinite Substance is the ultimate and immediate cause of all things (identical with the religious notion of God). This Substance is the self-caused, self-existing cause pervades nature through and through. Thus, the only object of true knowledge is nature, for by knowing nature (in its cause), we know God. Arguing from this he proceeded to relate Substance to the realm of individual beings Although Substance is one and capable of no division, it is also infinite and therefore is capable of having an infinite number of attributes (these being quite different than divisions). Of these infinite attributes, there are two (thought and extension) that intelligible to man. It is by means of these two attributes that infinite Substance causes and penetrates nature and the finite world—although the two attributes themselves are infinite, they have an infinite number of finite modifications, of which man is one, and other things and beings in nature are others. Thus did Spinoza explain the cause of finite existence. Then through the study and knowledge, of the finite world (all nature), understood in all its ramifications as a manifestation of Substance (God), man is able to form an intellectual love of God which is the same as having a true knowledge of Him. In Fact, he reacted against dualism between mind and body, almost inevitable if you begin in a solipsistic position, leads to unattractive consequences and in particular the lack of intelligibility of the relation between minds and bodies. So Spinoza invented a radical monism.
Spinoza’s theory of knowledge is relevant to his conception of the good life. A human being is the subject to various causal processes which physiologically affect him in relation to his central drive for self-preservation. Those that contribute to it give him general pleasure; those that undermine him bring about pain. But as bodies interact, humans come to form more general ideas, which are what Spinoza called adequate ideas, which are necessary and clear.
Having clear ideas means also having greater control. It involved therefore an increase in human freedom. In so far as we come to understand the total infinite system we approach the condition of God. Moreover, not only does understanding give us greater control, it replaces the confused ideas which are, or produce in us, passions, and so we simply replace passions with rational desire which conform to the goals of all humans. In short, we are delivered both from the passions and from competitive struggles with others. True freedom resides then in knowledge, and the free person leaves behind her the confusions of ordinary moral discourse, with its illusions of freedom and its use of praise and blame. The free person ultimately will achieve the love of God and become united with God.
So though in some ways Spinoza came close to Hobbes in thinking that we should hand over our welfare through a social contract, he did not opt as Hobbes did for monarchy as the safest system, but rather for a bourgeois mercantile democracy, with its openness and tolerance that he himself experienced in Amsterdam. There is a thoroughly maverick aspect of Spinoza’s system. It is a system which hangs together. There is a pleasing logic to the whole network of notions that he presents. But it of course begins from that old idea of substance. The hand of Aristotle is visible. A monistic materialism is an obvious invitation. Still, it is a highly original construction. Spinoza’s influence was slight after his death, but he became fashionable in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) was a person of dazzling achievements, among them the discovery of the infinitesimal calculus in 1676. He studied philosophy at Leipzig, mathematics at Jena and law at Altdorf. He was for a while in Paris, and was in the service of the House of Hanover, for whom he compiled a history of the Brunswick family. In 1700 he became founding president of what was to become the Prussian Academy of Sciences. His systematic philosophy can be discovered in a wide variety of documents and correspondences, including his “Discourse on Metaphysics” (1686). the “New system of Nature” and of the Interaction of Substances” (1695) and the “Monadology” (1714), as well as in his one large book, the “Theodicy” (1710).
The picture which Leibniz painted of the cosmos is a startling one. The whole universe is a system of enclosed or, as Leibniz said, windowless monads, each of which reflected the state of every other, according to a pre-established harmony. This radical pluralism is highly different from the monism of Spinoza. He expressed certain profound ideas of dialectical nature. He insisted that the world consisted of tiny elements or monads-spiritual elements of being possessing activeness and independence, continually changing and capable of suffering, perception and consciousness. Leibniz thus added to the concept of substance that of active force, or the Aristotelian principle of the self-motion of matter. But Leibniz removed the pantheistically perceived God from Spinoza’s single substance. According to Leibniz, God towers above the corporeal world, being its “culprit and master”. The unity and agreement among the monads is the result of divinely pre-established harmony. Thus the lower monads have but the vaguest representations (that is the state which the inorganic world and the vegetable kingdom are in); in animals, the representations reach the stage of sensation, and in man, that of clear understanding, of reason. Attributing to monads active force as their principal property, establishing the energy links between them, and, on the other hand, defending the idea of God the Creator, Leibniz through theology arrived at the principle of the inseparable (and universal, absolute) connection of matter and motion. Rejecting the notion of space and time as self-contained principles of being existing apart from matter and independently of it, he regarded space as the order of mutual arrangement of a multitude of individual bodies existing outside one another, and time, as the order in which phenomena or states of bodies succeed one another. One of the major achievements of Leibniz’s philosophy was his theory of an individual monad as a concentrated world, as a mirror of the one infinite universe. The underlying motivation for Leibniz to have painted this picture, is to render, in effect, all truths as necessary. This is a paradox, since he set out by distinguishing necessary truths or truths of reason and truths of fact. The former are such that they cannot be denied without contradiction. For Leibniz every proposition is of subject-predicate form, so the predicate of a truth of reason is contained in its subject. But the truths of fact are not like this.You can deny them without contradiction. But still on a deeper analysis they have their own necessity. First of all all the truths of fact in a given universe are mutually reflective, and they together define this universe. But God must have a sufficient reason for creating this universe and not some other. Despite the idealist basis of Leibniz’s system, his dialectics of the general and the individual was highly appreciated in dialectical materialism. In his logical studies Leibniz worked out a rational logical symbolism, and revealed the structure and laws of proof as one of the fundamental devices used by rational cognition. He was one of the founders of modern symbolic and mathematical logic.
The disadvantages of rationalism are in the following:
1. The denial of the importance and role of experience in getting
universal, and truthful knowledge.
1. The refusal of dialectics in the process of gaining knowledge, that is, from incomplete knowledge to entire and then to absolute one.
The second half of the 18th century was an epoch of acute aggravation of the conflict between the feudal and bourgeois worldviews, particularly in France. This conflict came to a head in the bourgeois revolution. Ideologically, it was prepared in the works of the 18th-century French philosophers: Voltaire (1694-1778), Rousseau (1712-1778), Diderot (1713-1784), La Mettrie(1709-I751), Helvetius (1715-1771) and Holbach (1723-1789). They resolutely fought against religion and the socio-political order in contemporary France.
The creation of the French Encyclopedia in the middle of the eighteenth century was a major publishing event, and brought together a number of vital philosophers, primarily under the leadership of Denis Diderot and including Holbach, Rousseau and Voltaire among others. Because of its free thinking and challenging character the publication of the Encyclopedia was suspended in 1759 but eventually was finished in 1772, in seventeen volumes of letterpress and a further eleven of plates.
The main streams of the 18th century French philosophy were deism, atheism, materialism and Utopian-socialism.
Deism (from Latin “dues” meaning God) the philosophical doctrine that reduces the role of God to a mere act of creation and held that after the original act God virtually withdrew and refrained from interfering in the process of nature and the ways of man. Francois-Marie Arquet Voltaire (1694-1778) was a passionate and gifted critic of intolerance and of the outmoded institutions of the ancient regime. But his plans for tolerance were not anti-religious. His awe before the Divine in a vast universe was tempered by the thought that God is not benevolent and indeed his theism was considerably out of accord with the Christian revelation and the Church. He was appalled by the cruelty of the Inquisition, the backwardness of the Church and the disaster of the close alliance between Church and State. He was a powerful campaigner for the reform of the law, the abolition of torture and so forth: many of these ideas were incorporated in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” in 1789.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) gave eloquent expression to the idea of an idealized nature, partly as a means of criticizing existing society. Rousseau’s views on education, expressed in “Emile”, stressed the natural progress of the human heart, towards a moral life in society in union with fellow-humans, Rousseau in his Control social introduced the idea that in civil society humans achieve freedom through the total alienation of each associate with all his rights to the community. He will obey the general will, and will thereby achieve true freedom by obeying a law that he has laid upon himself. In this Rousseau prepared the way, unwittingly, for nationalism and totalitarianism. It would prove easy to manipulate the notion of the general will. Many of the ideas of the Encyclopedia were to explode refreshingly on the scene during the French Revolution. They had their influence too on the earlier American Revolution and the formation of the United States Constitution. They also influenced Germany.
The Encyclopedia was deliberately created in a manner designed to stir up the ancient regime. Diderot boldly proclaimed that sovereignty rests with the people, and in various ways stated principles upon which the revolution was to be based. Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was an editor with D'Alembert of the French Encyclopedia. Beginning as a deist (i.e. God exist, but has no relation to the world), he concluded his life as a pantheist (i.e. God is totally in nature). He advocated skepticism in opposition to dogmatism and held that noting could be taken as absolutely true for all time. Since change is the fundamental principle of life - or so our sense experience tells us - truth must, like everything else, be subject to change.
Diderot was a most interesting materialist. He saw the universe as matter in motion that was inherent in it. It was atomic in structure, and sensitive. He also considered higher organisms as acquiring properties, rather like a swarm of bees which functions like a single organism: the unity of the organism in effect derives from the life of the whole. Thought is a property of the brain. Diderot was stick to the conception of the development of organisms. According to that theory, nature, or matter, is the cause of everything; it exists by itself, and it will continue to exist and to act eternally; it is its own cause. All material bodies consist of atoms. In relation to man, matter is everything that acts in one way or another on the sense organs.
Paul-Henri Baron d ’ Holbach (l723-1789), German nobleman who settled in Paris and became a French citizen. A severe and outspoken atheist, he was highly critical of religion and the Church. He developed the doctrine of eternal change (nothing in nature is fixed; nature is capable of and is forever giving rise to new organisms, hitherto unknown; man is not exempt from this law of change; man cannot exist without nature, though nature can exist without man). By this doctrine, man has no special role in the universe; all things traditionally postulated about his uniqueness and worth are meaningless. His atheistic materialism was stated in his “The System of Nature” (1770). Though his position was cruder than Diderot’s he was nevertheless a staunch believer in freedom of thought and of the press, the separation of Church and State, and constutionalism. He described his own political outlook as ethocratic, in which the State nurtures the virtues through which people help one another. If the people are unhappy they have the right to overthrow the rulers, since the social contract is based on the mutual usefulness of individuals and the State, and the State is a means, not an end.
Materialism of those times was mechanistic and metaphysical. Since other sciences, such as chemistry and biology, were at the embryonic stage, the standpoint of the most advanced sciences of those times, mechanics and mathematics, naturally seemed universal. The thinkers of that period saw mechanics as the key to the mystery of the entire universe. The application of the mechanical method resulted in striking progress in the cognition of the physical world. The notion of the mechanical determinedness of natural phenomena was greatly consolidated by the powerful influence of Newton’s discoveries, as his views were based on a sound mathematical substantiation of mechanical causality. Mechanics, however, knows only motion—it does not know development. That was why the method of thinking used by philosophers was largely metaphysical in those times, too. Materialistic philosophy of the 17th century had some common characteristics:
1. It manifested materialism in a crude atheistic form;
2. It was based on natural science and stick upon its deduces;
3. It was contradictory to metaphysics;
4. It had got mechanistic character;
5. It was contemplative in the theory of knowledge and idealistic as for the conception of the society.
18th-century French philosophers regarded religion as a spiritual weapon of enslaving people, and a tool in the hands of the tyranny. The path of liberation of the people from religion and prejudices lay through enlightenment. At this point they were close to the principles of atheism, and to understanding of the need for a revolutionary transformation of social life: man and the personal qualities of man depended on the environment, so his vices were also the result of the environment. To remould man, to free him from shortcomings, and to develop his positive aspects, it was necessary to transform the environment, in the first place social environment. This doctrine played a great role in the philosophical substantiation of the ideas of Utopian socialists. Utopian socialists such as Owen, Saint Simon and Charles Fourier were mostly concerned on the ideal society problem. They proclaimed the society founded on the basis of social justice and equality. They happened to be forerunners of socialism and hoped that after the 18th century’s critical work in the Encyclopedia the 19th century could make a new one which would prepare a new industrial and scientific system.
LECTURE 8.
CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY.
1. I.Kant and his critical philosophy.
2. Idealism: Fichte and Schelling on the road to Hegel.
3. Hegel, the giant of the XYШ-th century German philoso-
phy.
4. Feuerbach as a necessary slepping stone for non-classic
philosophy of the XIX-XX-th centuries.
At the turn of the 19th century, Germany, overcoming its economic and political backwardness, was nearing a bourgeois revolution; just as in France, the socioeconomic revolution was preceded by a philosophical one.
An important role in the formation of classical German philosophy was played by the achievements of natural science and the social sciences: chemistry and physics began to develop, and the study of organic nature made considerable advance. Discoveries in mathematics which afforded an understanding and precise quantitative expression of natural processes; Lamarck’s theory of the conditioning of the organism’s evolution by the environment; astronomical, geological, and embryological theories, as well as theories of human society – this pushed into the foreground, resolutely and inevitably, the idea of development as a theory and as a method of cognition of reality.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was one of the greatest minds mankind ever knew and the founder of classical German idealism. It was with Kant that the dawn of the philosophy of the Modern Times broke.
Born in Königsberg in what was then Prussia and he lived there all his life. From 1770 he occupied the Chair of Logic and metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. In 1794 he was forbidden to publish more on religion, as his book on the subject had caused turbulence; no controversy ensued, since he complied with the royal order. His metronomic and quiet life was punctuated by a series of major publications – the “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781), the “Critique of Practical Reason” (1790), the “Critic of Judgment” (1790), the “Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone” (1793) and the “Metaphysics of Morals” (1797), together with other important works.
He was shrewd and profound thinker not only in philosophy. His theory of the origin of the solar system out of a giant gas nebula still remains one of the fundamental scientific ideas in astronomy. Kant’s natural scientific works broke down the wall of the metaphysical explanation of nature, as he made his attempt to apply the principles of contemporary natural science not only to the structure of the universe but also to the history of its origin and development. Apart from this, he put forward the idea of lining up animals in the order of their possible origin, and the idea of natural origin of the human races.
Kant believed that the solution of the problems of being, of morality and religion must be preceded by a study in the possibilities of human knowledge and the boundaries of human knowledge. According to Kant, the necessary conditions of knowledge are inherent in reason itself, forming the basis of knowledge. It is these conditions that lend knowledge the properties of necessity and universality. They are also the absolute boundaries of reliable knowledge Kant distinguished between the appearances of things as they were perceived by man and the things as they existed by themselves. We do not study the world as it is in reality but only as it appears to us. Only phenomena constituting the content of our experience are accessible to our knowledge. The impact of “things-in-themselves” on our sense organs results in a chaos of sensations, which is brought to unity and order by the power of reason. What we regard as the laws of nature are in actual fact the connection brought into the world of phenomena by reason; in other words, reason prescribes laws to nature. But corresponding to the word of phenomena is the essence of things independent of human consciousness, or “things-in-themselves”. Absolute knowledge of these is impossible. To us, they are only noumena, that is to say, intelligible essences not given in experience. Kant did not share the boundless belief in the power of human reason, referring to this belief as dogmatism. He believed there was a certain moral sense in the fundamental limitations of human knowledge: if man were endowed with absolute knowledge, he would face neither risk nor struggle in the performance of his moral duty.
Kant was convinced that the ideas of time and space are known to man before perception. Space and time are ideal, not real. Sense impressions are interconnected by means of judgments based on categories or general concepts which, according to Kant, are purely logical forms, characterizing pure thought and not its subject. The categories are given to man before all experience, that is to say, a priori. Dialectics figured prominently in Kant’s epistemology: contradiction was regarded as a necessary element of cognition. But dialectics was for Kant merely an epistemological principle it was subjective as it did not reflect the contradictions of the things themselves, merely the contradictions of intellectual activity.
Kant’s philosophy was not free from compromise with idealism. Endeavouring to recognize science and religion, Kant said he had to limit the domain of knowledge to give room to faith.
Kant had an original approach to questions of moral sense and the like. It was to consider whether the motive of an action or the principle on which I am acting on could be generalized without contradiction. If I think it is all right for me to lie under such-and-such circumstances, then we have to consider what would happen if everyone lied. Language would break down. So there is a contradiction in the universalization of the maxim of my action. This yields the notion of what Kant referred to as categorical imperative, which he formulated in different ways, such as “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a Universal Law of Nature”. There are two points of notice. First, this imperative is categorical. The moral law has no hypothetical character, like “If you want to make money, go into the law”, which would be merely prudential advice. Morality is absolute, but prudence depends on prior inclinations. Second, morality is conceived by Kant as something categorically laid by the individual on himself. He is his own legislator. In other words morality is autonomous and not heteronomous or laid on us by others. From all this, a certain psychology of morals emerges: the individual, finding his inclinations liable to be overruled by the categorical imperative, develops for it a special reverence.
His third Critique dealt with esthetic judgment (including an analysis of the notions of both beauty and the sublime). He also there dealt with teleology. He was anxious to avoid the idea that esthetic judgments have any kind of objectivity in case speculative theology based on the teleological argument was to re-arise. But esthetic judgments do claim to be universal. How can this be? The universal side arises not from the application of some concept but in the delight arising from the free play of the understanding and sensibility, which we ascribe as occurring in all humans.
Altogether the edifice of Kant’s system is tremendous. His wide-ranging synthesis was greeted on the whole with admiration. At any rate he established himself as the leading German philosopher of his day, perhaps of all time. He towered above his predecessors, and he set in train many fruitful moves in the nineteenth century. He could appeal to philosophers of differing traditions, and could connect with English-speaking debates in particular.
After Kant, classical German philosophy was developed by such outstanding philosophers as Fichte and Schelling. Both of them tried to overcome the Kantian opposition of phenomenon and noumenon by grounding cognitive activeness in some unitary principle – the absolute ego, as in Fichte, or the absolute identity of being and thinking, as in Schelling.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) was of a poor family in Saxony but through a local nobleman obtained an education, and eventually became Professor of Philosophy at Jena (though he was driven from there in 1799 on suspicion of atheism). At his death he was Rector of the University of Berlin. His most important publication was his “Basis of the Entire Theory of Science” (1794). As well as developing an idealist philosophy he was an important proponent of pan-German nationalism, and a pioneer of socialist thinking. The heart of his interest was morals, but he set this in the context of a kind of absolute realism.
He was impressed with Kant, but saw that his own critique of the master had drastic consequences. He considered that there was some instability at the core of the Kantian worldview, which was the concept of “things in themselves”. If one wanted seriously to tread the path of things one would end up a materialist; if not, then one would end up an idealist. This path he himself took, and criticized Kant for the noumena which in no way, according to Kant’s own principles, could give rise to (that is cause) phenomena. They were superfluous, but their removal meant that the explanation of the world lies on the near side of the subject-object distinction. But to explain the world via an Ego it is impossible to identify this with the individual. So we call on the notion of an Absolute Ego (later he wrote of an Absolute Being). Such a Being is not God, in that the latter has to be a person and a person is finite. This is why Fichte was attracted to Spinoza, and why he was accused of atheism. But at the heart of the Absolute there lies ethical concern, and reverence for what could for Fichte substitute for God. The Absolute Ego creates the non-ego as the field for its moral activity: however, if both are unlimited they will tend to blot each other out. So there is a third proposition to be affirmed (a synthesis of the prior thesis and antithesis), namely the positing of a divisible non-ego as opposed to a divisible ego. In other words, the Absolute produces finite self-consciousness which arises through its perception of the resistance of the natural world.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) was raised in Württemburg and went to Tübingen University where he was close to Hegel and Hölderlin. At 23 he was appointed to a Chair at Jena. Eventually he taught at Berlin and among those who attended his lectures were an unlikely constellation – Kierkegaard, Burckhardt, Engels and Bakunin. In his earlies philosophy, published in 1800 as his ”System of Transcendental Idealism”, his ideas were a stepping stone between Fichte and Hegel. His absolute idealism, similar to Fichte’s, had a much warmer conclusion, since he saw the philosophy of art as the culmination of his metaphysics. In nature the Absolute partially manifests the fusion of the real and the ideal through the production of organisms, but it is in the free creative world of art that we can find the intuition of the infinite in the finite product of the intelligence. The artist is not, however, thereby a philosopher, since he may not have the self-understanding to appraise the significance of his achievement.
If Fichte and Schelling are a bit dry in the rather unwieldy maneuvering of absolutes and egos, they prepared the way for Hegel’s moving Absolute Idealism, which itself drew together strands from the criticism of Kant, the emergence of romanticism, the greater conclusioness of history and the flowering of the intellectual life as systematized in the German universities, the leaders in their day. His huge synthesis helped to stimulate intellectual development, especially in the humanities, and of course he was a powerful shaper of Marx, who in turn had a huge effect on the emerging social sciences.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was born at Stuttgart and educated at Tübingen. He co-operated with Schelling in publishing a critical journal of philosophy, taught at a school in Nüremberg, and in due course (1818) became a Professor of Philosophy in Berlin. His two most important works were the “Phenomenology of Mind” (1807) and “The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences” (1817). Also important was “Philosophy of right” (1821); and after his death his writings were edited by a group of friends and came out in eighteen volumes (1832-1834).
If Fichte established the Absolute, Hegel gave it motion. The Absolute is the totality, which is a process, and this process tends towards self-understanding. Like Aristotle’s God it is self-thinking thought, but unlike Aristotle Hegel saw the totality as tending towards self-understanding. He wanted to set this process forth as a dialectical one. And he did this in three parts (Hegel was in love with triads), in regard to logic, nature and spirit (Geist). From a logical point of view we start with the judgment that the Absolute is Being. But pure Being has within itself a kind of instability. In being completely indeterminate it is equivalent to Nothing. In flickering from Being to Nothing and back again it exhibits something which can be understood by a third notion, which rises beyond the first two, but ‘takes them up’ in a synthesis, namely the notion of Becoming. This helps to illustrate Hegel’s dialectical method. He did not think of contradictions as sings of the breakdown of thinking. Rather he saw it as a stimulus to a higher stage, a synthesis, in which the contradiction is taken up and for the time being resolved. He considered that the limited nature of our concepts is bound to give rise to contradictions (there is a reflection here of Kant’s antinomies, or contradictory conclusions arrived at when concepts are used beyond the realm of phenomena).
The final and most important part of Hegel’s encyclopedic work dealt with the philosophy of Spirit or Mind. First of all we have the spirit as sensing and feeling subject, which is actual as embodied. It is sunk in a kind of slumber, for so far it has not gained consciousness. But now consider it as aware of outer objects: it has got, so to speak, something to push against. This inevitably leads to a third phase in which the duality between subject and object is overcome, namely self-consciousness. But the ballet of triads goes on, because the self-consciousness individual comes to recognize a universal self-consciousness in which he perceives other selves. Hegel went on to examine at a higher level the nature of finite spirit, and stressed the importance of free will seen as a combination of the theoretical and the practical spirit.
The Totality objectifies itself though nature, which as it were provides resistance for finite spirits and so self-consciousness and then a sort of universal consciousness. But this is not any regular doctrine of creation, though Hegel does have a role for religious language as expressing philosophical insights imaginatively. The Spirit objectifies itself through the ethical substance of human life, which Hegel characterized as the family, civil society and the State. Civil society is something of an abstraction since it is typically or always developed as a State, but it stands for the network of economic relationships and organizations through which individuals mesh with one another. But the State is the highest manifestation of the objective Spirit, in which human beings submit their wills to rules and their feelings to the control of reason. It incorporates individual freedom, but this is nevertheless subordinate to a higher freedom (there is a strong influence from Rousseau here).
It is through the history of States that the World Spirit comes to self-realization. Hegel did not seemingly look forward to a world government. The struggle of States was in its way good in maintaining competition and ethical health. War itself was natural and rational in keeping the dialectic of history in motion. Hegel saw freedom being most fully realized in the Germanic States in which the Reformation played a vital role. The supreme expression of the onward progress was the Prussian State.
Philosophy itself, properly understood, is the coming into full self-consciousness of the Absolute, so the philosopher has a spearhead role in the whole evolution of the universe as it thinks itself. This lofty view of the role or philosophy, combined with the huge sweep of Hegel’s interests and concerns, gave him a formidable inspirational role in the German culture of the period, and stimulated work in varied and manifold direction – in history, in esthetics, in the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of law, to name a few. It was not a lucid system but it was imposing.
However, there is a deep inner contradiction in Hegel’s philosophy. What contradiction is that? Hegel’s method is directed towards the infinity of cognition. Since the objective basis is absolute spirit, and the goal, the self-cognition of that spirit, cognition is finite and limited. In other words, passing through a system of cognitive stages, the system of cognition is crowned by the last stage that of self-cognition, of which the realization is Hegel’s system of philosophy itself. The contradiction between the finite Hegel’s method and system is a contradiction between the finite and the infinite. This contradiction in Hegel is by no means dialectical, for it does not become the source for further development.
Classics of Marxism-Leninism subjected Hegel’s idealism to acute and comprehensive critique, but at the same time they highly appreciated the positive elements contained in his work, above all his dialectics.
A different trend was represented in the system of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), the greatest materialist and the last representative of classical German philosophy. He studied at Erlangen and taught there for a while, but was sacked when his authorship of an anonymous work attacking Christianity became known. He lived off a small pension and royalties for much of his life. His most vital works were his “Essence of Christianity” (1841) and his “Essence of Religion” (1846). His critigue of Hegel was important for the group known as “left Hegelians”, of whom the most important product was Marx.
Feuerbach saw a contradiction nesting in Hegel’s thought. Secretly there lay a hidden religious spirit in a system that claimed to be rational. It was the culmination of modern rationalism and yet it quietly degraded the material world. Once this was exposed, the way could be prepared for a humanist ethics. The consciousness which was in effect deified by Hegel is nothing other then our consciousness. Idealism does have a contribution to make, namely its analyses of human consciousness, even if it is in the alienating mode of the analyses of absolute being. It is possible in the light of this thought to see that religion itself is a projection of humanity on to the cosmos. God is a disguise for ideal humanity. The Christian doctrine of the incarnation is nothing other than a projection of the desire to become divine by the ultimate love of our fellow human beings. Feuerbach altered the direction of Hegel. In no way is matter somehow the creation of the Absolute Spirit, but on the contrary, spirit arises out of the material world. If we wish to deify humanity, let us do it through a humanistic ethics.
Feuerbach’s materialism remained traditionally metaphysical. Its characteristic feature was anthropologism: the view of man as the highest product of nature, the tendency to consider man in an indivisible unity with nature. Nature is the basis of spirit. It must also be the basis of philosophy called upon to reveal the earthly essence of man, whom nature endowed with senses and reason and whose psyche depends on this physical constitution, possessing at the same time a qualitative specificity irreducible to the physiological processes. Feuerbach’s anthropologism also played a great role in the struggle against the idealist interpretations of man, against the dualistic opposition of man’s spiritual element to the corporeal one, and against vulgar matherialism. But the “natural” side of man was exaggerated, and the social one, underestimated.
In his critic of agnosticism Feuerbach assumed that human thought correctly reflects the reality existing outside consciousness. The senses played the most important part in his epistemology: only the sensuous is as clear as the sun. To think means to connect one sense organ datum with another. Feuerbach regarded all forms of cognition (sensations, representations, concepts, ideas) as images or copies of things, of their properties and relations. Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism was metaphysical in nature: it was passively contemplative, and did not take into account socio-historical practice; for this, Marx criticized him in his “Theses on Feuerbach”.
One of Feuerbach’s achievements was the fact that he showed up the links between idealism and religion, demonstrating that their root lay in divorcing thinking from being and transforming ideas into independent essences. Feuerbach subjected the origin and essence of religion to a profound and striking analysis, but he traced its roots only to man’s psychology, his consciousness and emotions, in the first place the feeling of love. A human being is God to another human being.
The main peculiarity of Feuerbach’s teaching is asserting anthropology instead of theology. On the contrary of Humanism of the Renaissance that raised the Man into the center of philosophies Feuerbach attempted to ruin the very idea of God. His God is a deified humanity. Exposing the idea of the man’s uniqueness he becomes actually not exactly classical philosopher but the founder of a new non-classical philosophy of Western Europe.
As for Classical German philosophy it entirely elaborated gnoceologism. So the further development of European philosophy was possible only by means of overcoming gnoceologism. In absolutization of the process of cognitive activity they worked out the principle of historicism, dialectical logics, the way of solving contradictions and limitless abilities of a subject to aware the Universe.
LECTURE 9.
CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY.
1. General characteristics of the XIX-XX centuries’ philosophy.
2. The Romantic Movement as the grounds for Neo-Classical Philosophies.
3. Currents of thought in the XIX century and Non-Classical
Philosophies.
4. The variety of doctrines in XIX-XX centuries.
Having got the highest point in Hegel’s theory gnoceologicism could not stimulate the development of philosophy any longer. The only possible way to go forth seemed to overcome gnoceological problems of man’s essence and to come for researching the problems of his existence.
Philosophies that were in revolt against traditions were of two kinds, rationalistic and romantic. They gave the ground to two great philosophical streams, neo-classical and non-classical philosophy.
The standpoint of neo-classical philosophy was the idea of identity of divine and humane, providing the importance of personality. Instead of mere cognizing the Universe human tried to alter it but within his own change. The ideas of religious overcoming of gnoseologism became the basic for such philosophies as Personalism and Religious Existentialism.
Non-classical philosophy aimed to research man embodied in flesh, one who possessed plenty of passions and instincts, who was eager for love. This philosophy was pioneered by Feuerbach and opened such philosophical positions as Sociocentricism, Voluntarism and Psychoanalysis which appeared in the XX-th century.
Non-classical philosophy of the XIX-XX centuries attempted to reveal the basics of human life burdened with sufferings and pains in unconsciousness that they expressed as transcendent, first impersonal and later illusive and symbolic standpoint. With the time passing this tendency would come to the statement of absurdness of human life.
The difference between classical and non-classical philosophy lies mainly in philosophical approach to general and individual in human. Non-classical philosophy is oriented on individual dominating over general, the problems of human existence over theoretical awareness. The human being instead of Universe being was set into the focus of its interests. Another fundamental difference is concerned their understanding of transcendental (Transcendental everything that goes beyond the borders of experience. In Christian culture it was God and
immortal soul striving to him). In classical philosophy transcendental is a
peculiar being that gives rise to empirical reality, being either estranged or identified with it. Classical philosophy insisted on the ontological character of transcendent.
Non-classical philosophy replacing transcendental with a real being regards it as a symbol expressing realities of human mental and material life. It gives it the character of imaginations and illusions. That is why non-classical philosophy is oriented on the human existence in empirical world as the only valuable reality.
Historical and cultural grounds of contemporary philosophy are as following:
1. Scientific and cultural revolution of the XIX-XX centuries opened great perspectives in understanding nature, cosmos and humanity, but simultaneously it stimulated such global problems as ecological, demographical, economical, energy, raw materials etc.
2. Philosophy was faced the necessity to regard the basic philosophical problem of man’s relation to the world in a new historical atmosphere, to refresh main ideas of classical philosophy that is of ultimate belief in human reason as the basic principle of realizing world structure, his understanding social progress as the progress of human reason, and social organization of people as a reasonable organization.
3. Modern scientific and technical revolution ruined the classical Newtonian picture of the world. The crisis phenomena of social life, in particular two world wars of the XX century, the existence of totalitarian regimes in some countries undermined man’s faith into powerfulness of human reason, of progress.
4. The tendency against classical rationalism was being spread in philosophy. The accent was brought on irrationalistic aspect of reality. The essence of the Universe was not regarded in reason any longer but in extra reasonable World Will, which was primary as for reason and imagination (A.Schopenhauer).
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