Dictionary:

philosophy

  (fĭ-lŏs'ə-fē)

1. Love and pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means and moral self-discipline.
2. Investigation of the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning rather than empirical methods.
3. A system of thought based on or involving such inquiry: the philosophy of Hume.
4. The critical analysis of fundamental assumptions or beliefs.
5. The disciplines presented in university curriculums of science and the liberal arts, except medicine, law, and theology.
6. The discipline comprising logic, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and epistemology.
7. A set of ideas or beliefs relating to a particular field or activity; an underlying theory: an original philosophy of advertising.
8. A system of values by which one lives: has an unusual philosophy of life.

[Middle English philosophie, from Old French, from Latin philosophia, from Greek philosophiā, from philosophos, lover of wisdom, philosopher. See philosopher.]

To the ancient Greeks we owe our love of wisdom. Or at least the word philosophy, which is the same thing, phil meaning "love" and sophy meaning "wisdom." Combined, the two elements mean both a love of wisdom and a desire for it. In English, philosophy first appears in writing as early as 1340, when it is explained for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the word as "love of wysdome." Wisdom is a word native to English, but we had no term for the love of learning or the desire to gain wisdom. Like the rest of the Western world, we learned that from the Greeks.

Greek is one of the great contributors to English, and philosophy a great example of the Greek contribution. Like many other Greek words, it came to us not directly from the Greek but first through Latin and then through French, the two languages that have contributed even more than Greek to the English we know today.

The two parts of philosophy recombine themselves in numerous other words. Phil- is found, for example, in philanthropy, the love of humankind; philharmonic, loving music; philodendron, a plant that loves to hang around trees (dendron being tree); and Philadelphia, or the love of brother or sister. We are so comfortable with Greek that we can use it to make stunt words such as philopatrodomania, or the mania that comes from loving one's homeland, that is, homesickness. Phil with an added e also appears at the end of dozens of words from Greek like bibliophile, a lover of books; ailurophile, a lover of cats; oenophile, a lover of wine; Anglophile, a lover of things English, and Francophile, a lover of things French; and pedophile, one with a (perverted) love of children.

The soph part of philosophy also finds itself in English words, notably sophisticated, full of a certain kind of wisdom; and sophomore, combining the words for "wise" and "foolish" to represent the state of mind of a second-year college student.

It is thanks to the Greeks that we have schools and scholars in the first place; both of those English words are from the Greek. Even today, scholarly fields of study are named in Greek, using the suffix logy from logos meaning "word" or "discourse." The three hundred logys in present-day English include archaeology, discourse about old things; biology, discourse about life; oology, discourse about eggs; neurology, discourse about the nervous system; geology, discourse about the earth; psychology, discourse about the mind; theology, discourse about God; eschatology, discourse about the last days of the world; graphology, discourse about writing; cosmetology, discourse about cosmetics; terminology, discourse about terms; and criminology, demonology, ufology, and sexology, which need no introduction. And then, we have philology, the love of words, of discourse, of learning, the name formerly given to scholarship in language and literature.

English has many other words of Greek origin as well, everything from catalog (1460) to zeal (1382). All told, about 5 percent of the general English vocabulary comes from Greek. Even today, science and technology use elements of Greek and Latin to construct new English words. One hybrid example, is television, which uses tele (meaning "distant") from Greek and vision from Latin.

Like English, Greek is an Indo-European language. It is the sole member of the Hellenic branch. Modern Greek is spoken by about eleven million inhabitants of modern Greece. But it is the classical language, the ancestor of modern Greek, that is the basis for our philosophical borrowings.

For more information on philosophy, visit Britannica.com.

philosophy (Gk. philosophia, ‘love of knowledge’). 1. Greek. For the Greeks, ‘philosophy’, the pursuit of knowledge by rational enquiry, was an elastic term; it began with scientific speculation but it also included speculation as to the conduct of political and social life, and this last was one of the main concerns of philosophers in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Later Greek philosophy dealt with moral and religious questions, the concept of virtue and the individual's relations with the divine; it had then become not merely a mental activity but a way of life, to be followed in accordance with philosophical beliefs. Greek philosophy had its origins in the sixth century BC among the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor. It was then mainly occupied with speculation about the cause of the universe, and associated with the name of Thales of Miletus, whose chief successors (also sixth-century Milesians) were Anaximander and Anaximenes. These sought the material principle of the universe in some single uncreated and imperishable substance which underwent various modifications to produce the multitude of phenomena in the world: Thales thought that it was water, Anaximander something indeterminate, without specific qualities, and Anaximenes air. Heracleitus of Ephesus (writing in about 500 BC), standing apart from this school and rejecting the notion of a permanent substance underlying the variations of matter (though he thought the essential stuff of the universe to be pure fire), saw all things in a state of flux, and matter itself constantly changing.

Pythagoras (last quarter of the sixth century BC), an Ionian Greek from Samos who migrated to Croton, an Achaean colony on the toe of Italy, founded there a second school of philosophy which in some ways resembled a mystical sect, having secret doctrines not to be revealed to the uninitiated. The Pythagoreans saw in numbers and their relations the basis of the universe. The third school was that of Elea (also in Magna Graecia), founded by Parmenides (early fifth century BC) and continued by Zeno. This school distinguished between the true stuff of the universe, single, eternal, and unchangeable, and the unreal phenomena of change, diversity, and motion which are apparent to the senses. Empedocles of Acragas in Sicily, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae in Ionia, and Leucippus (perhaps Ionian also), all working in the fifth century BC, evolved fresh hypotheses about the physical basis of the universe, assuming not one single basic stuff but plural constituents.

Empedocles was the first to propound the theory of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, out of which everything is composed in varying proportions. Anaxagoras believed in an original mixture containing ‘seeds’ of every substance; more significantly, however, he introduced the important concept of an intelligence (nous) as a principle of force and order distinct from matter. Leucippus was said to be the originator of the school of atomist philosophy, which rested on the doctrine that the universe is composed of a vast number of atoms, mechanically combined. This doctrine was developed by Democritus, and found its most eloquent exponent in a later age at Rome, in Lucretius. During the sixth century the Ionian polymath and philosopher Xenophanes, relying on logic, constructed a rational theology.

Greek philosophy culminated in Socrates, in the second half of the fifth century, and Plato and Aristotle, in the fourth. The conquests of Alexander the Great, however, towards the end of the fourth century, swept away the context of their moral teaching, the independent city-states, the continued existence of which they had not doubted; and the later philosophies, those in particular of the Stoics and Epicureans (see EPICURUS), reveal a change of outlook: in them, interest has shifted from the theoretical problems of the nature of reality and the scope of knowledge to the practical problems of everyday behaviour. They are to some extent philosophies of resignation; they seek a road to peace and happiness in the state of mind of the individual, by making him independent of external circumstances. See also SCEPTICS, CYNICS, MEGARIAN SCHOOL, PERIPATETIC SCHOOL, ARISTIPPUS (founder of the Cyrenaic School), THEOPHRASTUS (the successor of Aristotle), ACADEMY, and NEOPLATONISM.

2. Roman. Rome came into close contact with Greek civilization, including philosophy, with the conquest of Magna Graecia in the third century BC and the occupation of Sicily, Greece, and part of Asia Minor in the second. At first Rome regarded Greek philosophy with some suspicion, and fears of its possibly subversive effects led to the temporary banishment of Greek philosophers in 173 and again in 161 BC. In 155 Carneades, Diogenes, and Critolaus, the heads respectively of the Academic, Stoic, and Peripatetic schools of philosophy in Athens, were sent on an embassy to Rome (to appeal against a large fine imposed by the Romans on Athens), and, giving lectures there, made a great impression. A little later Scipio Aemilianus received into his household the Stoic philosopher Panaetius of Rhodes; and in the early part of the first century BC a successor of the latter, Posidonius, became the friend and teacher of Varro in Rome and of Pompey and Cicero in Rhodes. The Romans were not much interested in theories as to the constitution of the universe, nor in elucidating the processes of thought and knowledge; and they produced no great original speculative philosophers or metaphysicians. Lucretius alone, in his poem De rerum natura (‘on nature’), expounded with enthusiasm the atomic theory put forward by Leucippus and Democritus.

The attention of the Romans was chiefly concentrated on ethical principles, and here they were mainly divided between Epicureans and Stoics, the latter prevailing. Stoic notions of duty and fate appealed to Roman severity. Cicero, who did much to make Greek philosophical thought known to his countrymen, was himself a follower of the New Academy (the Platonic school), with leanings towards the Stoics; he was in fact an eclectic, that is, he did not accept wholly the teaching of any one particular school, but picked out from their various doctrines those which commended themselves to him. Seneca (2) was the principal Roman Stoic author, and his writings had considerable influence on Christian ethics. The most famous of the later Roman Stoics were Marcus Aurelius (who wrote his Meditations in Greek) and Epictetus (who also wrote in Greek). The satirist Persius, under the influence of his teacher Cornutus, and the poet Lucan were followers of the same school. Under the influence of Seneca and his successors, the general tendency of Stoics was to become more practical and human. The tranquillity which the earlier Greek Stoics thought was the exclusive attainment of the sage who lived in detachment from the world was now seen to be attainable by men living fully in the world, through the exercise of fortitude and self-control. See also BOETHIUS.

(Greek, love of knowledge or wisdom) The study of the most general and abstract features of the world and categories with which we think: mind, matter, reason, proof, truth, etc. In philosophy, the concepts with which we approach the world themselves become the topic of enquiry. A philosophy of a discipline such as history, physics, or law seeks not so much to solve historical, physical, or legal questions, as to study the concepts that structure such thinking, and to lay bare their foundations and presuppositions. In this sense philosophy is what happens when a practice becomes self-conscious. The borderline between such ‘second-order’ reflection, and ways of practising the first-order discipline itself, is not always clear: philosophical problems may be tamed by the advance of a discipline, and the conduct of a discipline may be swayed by philosophical reflection (see also owl of Minerva). At different times there has been more or less optimism about the possibility of a pure or ‘first’ philosophy, taking an a priori standpoint from which other intellectual practices can be impartially assessed and subjected to logical evaluation and correction (see methodology). The contemporary spirit of the subject is hostile to any such possibility, and prefers to see philosophical reflection as continuous with the best practice of any field of intellectual enquiry. For the philosophy of various disciplines, see the titles of those disciplines.

Philosophy in America has encompassed more or less systematic writing about the point of our existence and our ability to understand the world of which we are a part. These concerns are recognizable in the questions that thinkers have asked in successive eras and in the connections between the questions of one era and another. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, theologians asked: What was the individual's relation to an inscrutable God? How could human autonomy be preserved, if the deity were omnipotent? After the English naturalist Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, philosophers asked: How could human freedom and our sense of the world's design be compatible with our status as biological entities? Early in the twentieth century academic thinkers wanted to know: If we were biological organisms, enmeshed in a causal universe, how could we come to have knowledge of this universe? How could mind escape the limits set by causal mechanisms? By the second half of the twentieth century, professional philosophers often assumed that we were of the natural world but simultaneously presupposed that knowledge demanded a transcendence of the natural. They then asked: How was knowledge possible? What were the alternatives to having knowledge?

Much philosophical exchange existed across national boundaries, and it is not clear that anything unique characterizes American thought. Nonetheless, standard features of philosophy in this country stand out. In the period before the Revolutionary War, thinkers often looked at the "new learning" of Europe with distaste, and the greater religious coloration of American thought resulted from self-conscious attempts to purge thinking of the evils of the Old World. In the nineteenth century the close association of thinkers in Scotland and America revealed both their dislike of England and their sense of inferiority as its intellectual provinces. In the twentieth century the strength and freedom of the United States, especially in the period of Nazi dominance, made America an attractive destination for European intellectuals and dramatically altered philosophy at home. During the period of the Vietnam War suspicion of the United States also affected thought.

From the middle of the eighteenth century American thinkers have been attracted to idealism, that speculative view that existence is essentially mental. The position of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, that the physical world did not transcend consciousness, or of objective or absolute idealism, that the world was an aspect of an absolute mind, has repeatedly been formulated as a viable option. Thinkers have also enunciated communitarian idealism—that one or another aggregate of finite minds defines reality. But there has been a long circuitous march from a religious to a secular vision of the universe. In America this march has taken a longer time than in other Western cultures. One might presume that the march would diminish the role of the mental, a term often a step away from the spiritual or religious. But despite the growing emphasis on the nonreligious, the deference to one or another kind of idealism has meant in America that realism—the view that physical objects at least exist independently of mind—has often been on the defensive, although a constant option. The eccentric journey away from religion has meant the relatively slow growth of what is often thought to be realism's cousin, materialism—that monistic position opposed to idealism, stipulating that the mental world can be reduced to the physical. More to the point, idealism and a defense of science have often coincided. Philosophers have regularly conceded that scientific investigation could easily but erroneously combine with materialism, but they have usually argued that only some sort of idealism can preserve scientific priorities. The varieties of idealism have also been characterized by a strong voluntaristic component: the will, volition, and the propensity to act have been crucial in defining the mental or the conscious.

The Era of Jonathan Edwards

In the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century, people in America known formally as philosophers were part of a wider dialogue that had three major components. Most important were parish ministers, primarily in New England, who wrote on theology and participated in a conversation that embraced a religious elite in England and Scotland, and later Germany. These clerics expounded varieties of Calvinist Protestantism. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was the most influential and talented member of this ministerial group, which later included Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). But the latter two lived at a time when such thinkers were deserting their congregations and turning away from traditional Protestant doctrine.

The second major component of American speculative thought was located in the seminaries that grew up in the Northeast, the South, and the old Midwest throughout the nineteenth century. These institutions, often independent entities not connected to American colleges, were—aside from law and medical schools—the only places where an aspiring young man could receive instruction beyond what an undergraduate received; they arose to train a professional ministry. The specialists in theology at these centers gradually took over the role played by the more erudite ministry. Leonard Woods (1774–1854) of Andover Theological Seminary, Henry Ware (1764–1845) of the Harvard Divinity School, Nathaniel William Taylor (1786–1858) of the Yale Divinity School, Charles Hodge (1797–1878) of the Princeton Theological Seminary, and Edwards Amasa Park (1808–1900) of Andover belong to this cadre. Among these institutions Yale was primary.

The divinity school theologians had the major power base in the nineteenth century. They trained the ministers and controlled much learned publication. Their outlook tended to be more narrow and sectarian than that of those speculators who were not professors of divinity, but it is difficult to argue that they were not the intellectual equals of those outside the divinity schools.

A final group were actually known as philosophers; they were the holders of chairs in mental, moral, or intellectual philosophy in the American colleges of the nineteenth century. Their function was to support theoretically the more clearly religious concerns of the divinity school theologians and the most serious ministers on the hustings. The philosophers were inevitably ministers and committed Protestants themselves, but in addition to showing that reason was congruent with faith, they also wrote on the grounds of the social order and politics and commented on the affairs of the world. Frequently the presidents of their institutions, they had captive student audiences and easy access to publication. Worthies here include Francis Bowen (1811–1890) of Harvard, James McCosh (1811–1894) of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), and Noah Porter (1811–1892) of Yale, again the leading educator of philosophical students.

This philosophical component of the speculative tradition was provincial. Until after the Civil War, the American college was a small, sleepy institution, peripheral to the life of the nation. It leaders, including philosophers, participated in the shaping of public discourse but were generally undistinguished. Their libraries were inadequate, their education mediocre, and the literary culture in which they lived sentimental and unsophisticated. Europe barely recognized these philosophers, except when they went there to study. Yet the philosophers found senior partners in transatlantic conversations and were on an intellectual par with American clergymen and divinity school theologians.

The intersecting dialogues among amateurs, divinity school theologians, and college philosophers focused on the ideas of Edwards, expressed in works like his Religious Affections (1746) and Freedom of the Will (1754). His ruminations on the moral responsibility of the solitary person confronting a sometimes angry, at least mysterious, deity controlled subsequent thinking, which tended to emphasize a priori deliberation about the fate of the individual soul. Indeed, the founding fathers of the Revolutionary and Constitutional period—men like Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), James Madison (1751–1836), Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), and John Adams (1735–1826)—were rarely considered philosophers. They had denigrated the study of theology, made politics primary, and grounded their thought in history and experience.

Pragmatism

In the last third of the nineteenth century the work of Darwin dealt a body blow to the religious orientation of American speculative endeavors. The primacy of divinity schools in the scholarly world ended, and the explicit Christian thought that governed intellectual life all but disappeared. At the same time, in the space of thirty years, many old American colleges were transformed into large, internationally recognized centers of learning, while new public and private universities commanded national attention. Students who a generation earlier would have sought "graduate" training in Europe, especially Germany, or in an American seminary, would by 1900 attend a postbaccalaureate program in an American university to obtain the Ph.D., the doctoral degree. Many of these students now found in philosophy what previously had been sought in the ministry or theological education. Those who, in the nineteenth century, had been a creative force outside the system of the divinity schools and the colleges, vanished as professional philosophers took their place.

Among the first generation of university thinkers from 1865 to 1895, philosophical idealism was the consensus. At the end of the nineteenth century, one form of idealism—pragmatism—came to dominate the discourse of these thinkers. Pragmatism won out not only because its proponents were competent and well placed but also because they showed the philosophy's compatibility with the natural and social sciences and with human effort in the modern, secular world. A rich and ambiguous set of commitments, pragmatism associated mind with action and investigated the problems of knowledge through the practices of inquiry, tinting the physical world with intelligence and a modest teleology. Knowledge of the world was ascertainable, but the pragmatists did not define it as the intuitive grasp of a preexisting external object. Knowledge was rather our ability to adjust to an only semi hospitable environment. Beliefs were modes of action and true if they survived; experience competitively tested them. The pragmatists used Darwinian concepts in the service of philosophy. Nonetheless, at another level, pragmatism's use of Darwin permitted the reinstatement, in a chastened fashion, of beliefs that were religious if not Protestant. Pragmatists emphasized the way that ideas actually established themselves in communities of investigators and what their acceptance meant. If beliefs about the spiritual prospered, they were also true. In part, the world was what human beings collectively made of it. When most influential, pragmatism was a form of communitarian idealism.

There were two main variants of pragmatism. One was associated with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (a tradition that eventually extended to the end of the twentieth century). It included Charles Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), Josiah Royce (1855–1916), and later C. I. Lewis (1883–1964), Nelson Goodman (1906–1998), W. V. Quine (1908–2000), Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), and Hilary Putnam (1926–). This group of thinkers made mathematics, logic, and the physical sciences the model of inquiry, although William James, the most influential of them, famously held that science and religion were similarly justified and could each be defended.

The second variant of pragmatism was called "instrumentalism" by its leading light, John Dewey (1859–1952). Dewey's vision inspired a school of thinkers at the University of Chicago, where he taught in the 1890s, and shaped the intellectual life of New York City and its universities—New York University, City College of New York, the New School for Social Research, and Columbia—after he moved to Columbia in 1904. Instrumentalism in Chicago and New York took the social sciences as the model of inquiry and, especially in the person of Dewey, was far more interested in social and political issues than the pragmatism of Harvard.

While the philosophers in this period wrote for their own learned journals, they also contributed to the leading non-religious journals of opinion such as The Nation and The New Republic. Through the first third of the twentieth century, philosophy rationalized the work of the scholarly disciplines that promised solutions to the problems of life for which religion had previously offered only consolation. Public speaking went from ministerial exhortation to normative social-science reformism. This mix of the popular and the professorial in what is called the "golden age" of philosophy in America extended from the 1890s until Dewey's retirement in 1929. It gave philosophy its greatest influence and public import and produced a series of notable works—among them Peirce's essays in the Popular Science Monthly of 1877–1878, James's Pragmatism (1907), and Dewey's Quest for Certainty (1929).

Professional Philosophy

Although variants of pragmatism were never absent from discussion, in the second third of the twentieth century a number of vigorous academics conducted a refined epistemological critique of the empirical bases of knowledge. Pragmatic assumptions were called into question. C. I. Lewis of Harvard in Mind and the World-Order (1929) and Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) of the University of Pittsburgh in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956) were regarded as the preeminent writers in this area. The intellectual migration from Europe caused by the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s contributed to this argument when a uniquely stringent empiricism, logical positivism, made an impact on the debate after World War II. The United States became known for its "analytic philosophy, " which emphasized clarity and precision of thought, often using logic and the foundations of mathematics to make its points, denigrating much "normative" reasoning in the areas of social and moral philosophy, and presupposing an apolitical sensibility. Leading philosophers in the United States were secular in their commitments, but in a culture still oriented to Judeo-Christian belief, they turned away from the civic sphere.

These developments gave American thought worldwide honor in circles of scholars, but came at great cost to the public presence of philosophy and even to its audience in the academy. In contrast to what philosophy had been, both in and outside the university, during the period of James, Royce, and Dewey, philosophy after World War II had narrow concerns; it became a complex and arcane area of study in the university system. The 1960s accentuated the new academic status of philosophy. The radicalism and spirit of rebellion surrounding the Vietnam War condemned professional thought as irrelevant.

In the last quarter of the century a cacophony of voices competed for attention in the world of philosophy. A most influential movement still had a connection to Cambridge, originating in the "pragmatic analysis" developed after World War II by Goodman and Quine. This movement was often materialistic in its premises but also skeptical of all claims to knowledge, including scientific ones. The pragmatic analysts had an uneasy connection to an extraordinary publication of 1962, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Although Kuhn's work was ambiguous, it soon justified a much more romantic attack on the objectivity of science and on the pursuit of analytic philosophy itself. The publications of Richard Rorty (1931–) in the last twenty years of the century, especially Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), gave a deeper philosophical justification for these ideas, as many philosophers in philosophy departments rejected straitened approaches to their field without being able to assert a compelling vision of another sort. Moreover, scholars in other disciplines—most importantly in English departments—claimed that traditional philosophy had reached a dead end. These nondisciplinary philosophers challenged philosophers for the right to do philosophy. These developments took American philosophy from the high point of achievement and public influence of the "classic" pragmatists to a confused and less potent role at the end of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Brent, Joseph. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Clendenning, John. The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce. Rev. ed. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999.

Feigl, Herbert, and Wilfrid Sellars, eds. Readings in Philosophical Analysis. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949.

Kuklick, Bruce. Philosophy in America: An Intellectual and Cultural History, 1720–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. A comprehensive survey.

Miller, Perry. Jonathan Edwards. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949. The first and still the most influential of modern works on Edwards.

Muelder, Walter G., Laurence Sears, and Anne V. Schlabach, eds. The Development of American Philosophy: A Book of Readings. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.

Perry, Ralph. The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935. Still the authoritative work.

Rorty, Richard, M., ed. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Simon, Linda. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1998. The most recent of many biographies.

Stuhr, John J. ed. Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretative Essays. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, Press, 1991.

In the sixteenth century, "philosophy" still meant Aristotelianism in its medieval Christian form, with Platonism and other ancient doctrines, including stoicism, Epicureanism, skepticism, eclecticism, and various occult traditions, remaining on the academic margins, though they were becoming lively topics of intellectual controversy. Philosophical practice of the period was increasingly devoted to the comparative study of these systems. Opposing these dogmatic (or skeptical) traditions, however, was the novel and unorthodox question posed by Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), "whether it is useful for Christian philosophy to construct a new philosophy after that of the pagans, and if so, on what grounds." This was a challenge taken up by a number of fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century thinkers, including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and other Neoplatonists; Lorenzo Valla, Desiderius Erasmus, and other humanists; Rudolphus Agricola, Petrus Ramus, and other reformers of rhetoric and logic; Jacopo Zabarella, Giordano Bruno, and other Italian natural philosophers; and Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, and other champions of the "party of nature" and a self-proclaimed "new philosophy."

The study of these and other philosophical movements beyond the academic mainstream has been pursued in the past two generations, especially by Paul Oskar Kristeller and his students. This has opened up new perspectives on the history of Western thought, even though the older traditions—which tend to jump from the medieval theologian-philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1224/1225–1274) and Scholasticism directly to Descartes (1596–1650), the French rationalist and metaphysician, and other seventeenth-century system builders—have remained dominant in the modern philosophical canon.

The Break With Scholastic Philosophy

According to convention, modern philosophy begins with Descartes and the English empiricist and philosopher of science Francis Bacon (1561–1626), pivotal figures who broke decisively with the intellectual system of the late medieval world and helped to articulate a new agenda for philosophy. This simplifies a complex story, as medieval philosophy gave way to early modern systems of thought slowly, across several generations. But Bacon and Descartes indeed helped to usher in a revolutionary period in philosophy, with upheavals in crucial areas such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics, and political philosophy.

At the start of the seventeenth century, the presumptive authority of time-tested ancient thinkers, particularly the towering figure of Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.), still carried great weight in philosophy and the sciences. The overwhelmingly dominant philosophical system, firmly entrenched in the universities, was Aristotelian Scholasticism, a synthesis of Aristotle's philosophy with Christian doctrine that had been forged by Aquinas. But modern philosophers such as Bacon and Descartes rejected this traditional deference toward Aristotle and other ancient figures of authority and broke with the Scholastic system. The decline in respect for traditional philosophical authorities had various sources. The religious crises of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had shaken the presumption in favor of tradition, opening space for a more assertive questioning of received doctrine. Humanist scholars had unearthed and reintroduced lost systems of thought, such as ancient Greek atomism and classical skepticism, that presented alternatives to the theories of Aristotle, encouraging critical debate on the merits of all these competing systems. Developments in Renaissance science and the burgeoning scientific revolution were also exposing the fallibility of Aristotelian physics and cosmology. While Scholastic philosophy continued to dominate the universities through the seventeenth century, the main developments in modern philosophy came from thinkers operating outside of this old establishment, usually men of independent means or supported by aristocratic patronage rather than a professor's salary. These philosophers typically addressed their works to the educated classes more broadly and wrote in the vernacular rather than the Latin of Scholastic academia.

In practice the break with the Scholastic intellectual system helped to reestablish philosophy as an autonomous discipline outside of theology. While most of the leading early modern philosophers were religious believers who sought to develop philosophical theories consistent with their religious commitments, nevertheless there was a marked shift toward the scientific study of human nature and the physical world, unmediated by an explicit emphasis on theological doctrine. The trend toward secularization encompassed even ethics and political philosophy, with philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), David Hume (1711–1776), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) founding moral and political principles on reason or human nature, rather than the commands of God. (This "secularization thesis" is also part of the conventional story of modern philosophy, but it has been challenged by some recent scholars, most notably Hans Blumenberg.)

Association With the New Science

The agenda of early modern philosophy was closely connected with the new scientific worldview pioneered by figures such as Galileo (1564–1642), Kepler (1571–1630), and Newton (1642–1727). Bacon, Descartes, and the philosophers who followed them were gripped by the explanatory range and power of the new science and were concerned to articulate, codify, and defend its methods and to explore its implications for metaphysics and epistemology. Several philosophers of the period were involved firsthand in the practice of science: leading examples include Descartes and the German philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Kant. Early modern philosophers would also self-consciously import the experimental method of the new science into the realm of philosophy, as in the theories of mind developed by the British empiricists John Locke (1632–1704) and Hume.

The new scientific worldview brought a fresh range of philosophical questions to the fore. First, there were questions concerning scientific method (a particular interest of Bacon, Locke, and Hume). How could inductive extrapolation from observed phenomena to unobserved cases be justified? Would science ever show us the inner essence of things and explain their underlying causal powers, or was it limited to merely cataloging correlations and patterns among surface phenomena? Then there were the metaphysical questions. What did the success of the new mathematical, quantitative models of nature show us about the relationship between mathematics on the one hand and empirical reality on the other? In what sense were subjective features of experience like colors and sounds part of the material world? And, most pressingly, what was the status of human beings in the scientific world picture? Was there still room for free will, morality, religion, and the human soul in the vast, cold, deterministic world of the new mathematical sciences?

Epistemology

Early modern philosophy is justly famous for its reorientation toward epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. The examination of the processes by which we arrive at and justify knowledge claims took on a new primacy in the period, as philosophers such as Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant each in their own way urged the importance of clarifying the nature and limits of our own cognitive faculties. Apart from the general wisdom of examining the sources and justifiability of our beliefs before boldly advancing theories on subjects that may exceed our capacities, the new emphasis on epistemology had several more immediate motivations. It was connected to the collapse in the prestige of traditional sources of authority such as Aristotle and church doctrine. If ancient authorities no longer commanded automatic deference, then who—or what—should a responsible thinker take as a legitimate source of knowledge? It was also related to the questions of method and scientific procedure raised by the achievements of the new science. Most famously, it was prompted by the skeptical onslaught of figures like Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), the great French essayist and popularizer of ancient forms of skepticism, who argued that all the bases of our so-called knowledge are inadequate.

It is customary to distinguish between two main factions in early modern epistemology: the empiricists on the one hand and the rationalists on the other. The distinction can be overemphasized at the risk of falsely caricaturing the rationalists as hostile to empirical investigation, or of obscuring a complex pattern of intellectual influences back and forth between the two groups. Nevertheless the distinction does capture an important difference in approaches to the theory of knowledge. The empiricists—led by Bacon, Locke, and Hume—argued that all our ideas are ultimately acquired in experience, and that the limits of experience set boundaries on our knowledge. The empiricist thus counsels a certain humility: our knowledge is forever limited to the patterns and regularities we witness among the empirically observable features of the world; metaphysical speculation about the inner nature of things transcends our capacities. By contrast, the rationalists—led by Descartes, the Dutch Jewish metaphysician Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Leibniz—argued that our minds are innately furnished with certain ideas over and above those we acquire in experience. Using these innate ideas we can reason about things transcending experience. For the rationalist, this explains how we can have knowledge that goes beyond all possible empirical confirmation, either because of its universal nature (logic, mathematics, knowledge of the laws of nature) or because of its transcendent subject matter (God, the soul, morality).

Metaphysics

Early modern philosophers explored a wide range of issues in metaphysics (the study of the ultimate nature of reality), including, notably, problems of space and time, causation, the ultimate structure of matter, the nature of morality, and God. However, the most characteristic metaphysical questions of the period focus on the connection between the human mind or soul on the one hand and the physical world on the other. Clearly these issues were related to the epistemological turn, and in particular to Descartes's famous skeptical problem of how we can know that there is a physical realm beyond our minds at all. But such questions were also forced by reflection on the new scientific worldview. Advocates of the new science such as Galileo and Descartes argued that the objective, mind-independent world described by science could be exhaustively characterized in terms of mathematically tractable "primary" qualities such as shape, size, and motion. "Secondary" qualities such as colors, tastes, sounds, and smells were then downgraded to a derivative status and were in some sense observer-relative and mind-dependent, more a feature of subjective experience than ultimate objective reality. This distinction had great appeal for most early moderns, but it would be challenged by figures such as the Irish cleric George Berkeley (1685–1753), Hume, and Kant, who pointed out that a clear distinction between mind-dependent and mind-independent properties is not so easy to draw. Kant argued that even space and time were mind-dependent or "ideal." For Berkeley the notion of any mind-independent reality whatsoever was fundamentally incoherent: all that exists are minds and their ideas.

Granted the existence of an objective material realm, the next question concerned the relationship between the mind and the physical body. Descartes developed the popular theory that the mind is an immaterial soul-substance over and above the material brain, arguing that this helped to explain the existence of consciousness and made room both for an afterlife beyond bodily death and for free will (as well as moral responsibility) outside the deterministic laws governing the material order. But others thought the theory raised more problems than it solved, including difficulties in accounting for the causal interaction between immaterial soul and material body. Materialists such as Hobbes and Spinoza insisted that the human animal, mind included, was just a complex material system; others such as Locke counseled a metaphysical agnosticism about the ultimate nature of the thinking self.

Political Philosophy

The medieval church and the Scholastic tradition had located the source of political legitimacy in implicit divine approval of established dynasties, a conservative doctrine that left little room for individual rights against the monarch or for systems of popular sovereignty. Leading Protestant theologians such as Martin Luther (1483–1546) reaffirmed the doctrine of divine right, although some of the more radical Anabaptist reformers preached against it. The main philosophical revolt against this medieval tradition came with the social contract theorists: the Dutch legal scholar and philosopher Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Hobbes, Locke, and the Swiss-born social theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). These figures posited a hypothetical "state of nature" without government to explore the basic rights of the individual, and they argued that legitimate state authority was ultimately derived from such foundational individual rights, transferred conditionally through popular (though perhaps implicit) consent. The corollary was that individuals retained certain inalienable rights against government, that state authority was in some (perhaps quite attenuated) sense contingent on popular consent, and that regimes in breach of the implicit contract were illegitimate and could be justly overthrown. Locke would extend the contract theory to argue for religious toleration (although Catholics and atheists were excluded as beyond the pale) on the basis of natural rights, adding arguments premised on general empiricist epistemic humility and on the involuntary nature of religious belief. Conservatives such as Hume and Edmund Burke (1729–1797) attacked the contract theory, arguing that there was in fact no popular consent; the foundation of natural rights was metaphysically dubious; and the doctrine threatened to destabilize the ancient political settlements that secured peace and civic order.

In the international arena the Florentine diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) notoriously endorsed realism, the harsh doctrine that there are no moral constraints governing relations between distinct states. Here he was followed by Hobbes, a skeptic about political morality in the absence of an overarching sovereign power to coercively enforce duties. Opponents of realism included Grotius, who developed a substantial system of international law and moral precepts on the basis of treaty, and Kant, who argued that reason prescribed a universal political morality transcending national jurisdictions and advocated the creation of a "league of nations" to enforce international law.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bacon, Francis. Selected Philosophical Works. Edited by Rose-Mary Sargent. Indianapolis, 1999.

Berkeley, George. Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. Edited by Jonathan Dancy. Oxford and New York, 1998.

——. A Treatise Concerning the Principle of Human Knowledge. Edited by Jonathan Dancy. Oxford and New York, 1997.

Descartes, René. Selected Philosophical Writings. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.

Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford and New York, 1999.

——. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford and New York, 1998.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, 1996. Translation of Kritik der reinen Vernuft (1781/1787).

——. Ethical Philosophy: The Complete Texts of Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, Part II of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis, 1993. Includes a translation of Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785).

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Philosophical Essays. Translated and edited by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis, 1989.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford, 1975.

Spinoza, Baruch. A Spinoza Reader. Edited and translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton, 1994.

Secondary Sources

Ayers, Michael, and Daniel Garber, eds. The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1998. This collection of essays supplies impressive historical detail and covers many neglected figures from the period. It is extremely helpful for those already fairly familiar with the outlines of early modern philosophy, but perhaps a little overwhelming for the beginner.

Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, Mass., 1983.

Chappell, Vere, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Locke. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.

Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. 9 vols. New York, 1953–1963. Superseded in parts by recent scholarship, but still a classic survey. Volume 3 covers the Renaissance up to Bacon; volume 4 covers the rationalists Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz; volume 5 covers the British empiricists from Hobbes through Hume; and volume 6 covers the French Enlightenment and Kant.

Cottingham, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Descartes. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.

Cropsey, Joseph, and Leo Strauss, eds. History of Political Philosophy. 3rd ed. Chicago, 1987.

Garrett, Don, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.

Guyer, Paul, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.

Jolley, Nicholas. Locke: His Philosophical Thought. Oxford and New York, 1999.

Loeb, Louis E. From Descartes to Hume: Continental Metaphysics and the Development of Modern Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y., 1981. Presupposing some basic knowledge of standard approaches to the history of early modern philosophy, Loeb criticizes the traditional distinction drawn between the rationalists and the empiricists.

Norton, David Fate, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hume. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1993.

—THOMAS HOLDEN

n.

A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.