modern philosophy

The empiricism of Francis Bacon

The English philosopher, scientist, and statesman Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was an outstanding apostle of empiricism in a time bordering the late-Renaissance and early-modern periods of philosophy. Less an original metaphysician or cosmologist than the advocate of a vast new program for the advancement of learning and the reformation of scientific method, Bacon conceived of philosophy as a new technique of reasoning that would reestablish natural science on a firm foundation. In the Advancement of Learning (1605), he charted the map of knowledge: history, which depends on the human faculty of memory; poetry, which depends on imagination; and philosophy, which depends on reason. To reason, however, Bacon assigned a completely experiential function. Fifteen years later, in his Novum Organum, he made this clear. Because, he said, “we have as yet no natural philosophy which is pure,…the true business of philosophy must be…to apply the understanding…to a fresh examination of particulars.” A technique for “the fresh examination of particulars” thus constituted his chief contribution to philosophy.

Bacon’s hope for a new birth of science depended not only on vastly more numerous and varied experiments but primarily on “an entirely different method, order, and process for advancing experience.” This method consisted of the construction of what he called “tables of discovery.” He distinguished three kinds: tables of presence, of absence, and of degree (i.e., in the case of any two properties, such as heat and friction, instances in which they appear together, instances in which one appears without the other, and instances in which their amounts vary proportionately). The ultimate purpose of these tables was to order facts in such a way that the true causes of phenomena (the subject of physics) and the true “forms” of things (the subject of metaphysics, or the study of the nature of being) could be inductively established.

Bacon’s empiricism was not raw or unsophisticated. His concept of fact and his belief in the primacy of observation led him to formulate laws and generalizations. Also, his conception of form was quite unlike that of Plato (427/28–347/48 bce): a form for Bacon was not an essence but a permanent geometric or mechanical structure. His enduring place in the history of philosophy lies, however, in his single-minded advocacy of experience as the only source of valid knowledge and in his profound enthusiasm for the perfection of natural science. It is in this sense that “the Baconian spirit” was a source of inspiration for generations of later philosophers and scientists.

The materialism of Thomas Hobbes

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was acquainted with both Bacon and the Italian astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). With the first Hobbes shared a strong concern for philosophical method, with the second an overwhelming interest in matter in motion. His philosophical efforts, however, were more inclusive and more complete than those of his contemporaries. He was a comprehensive thinker within the scope of an exceedingly narrow set of presuppositions, and he produced one of the most systematic philosophies of the early modern period—an almost completely consistent description of humankind, civil society, and nature according to the tenets of mechanistic materialism.

Hobbes’s account of what philosophy is and ought to be clearly distinguished between content and method. As method, philosophy is simply reasoning or calculating by the use of words as to the causes or effects of phenomena. When people reason from causes to effects, they reason synthetically; when they reason from effects to causes, they reason analytically. (Hobbes’s strong inclination toward deduction and geometric proofs favoured arguments of the former type.) His dogmatic metaphysical assumption was that physical reality consists entirely of matter in motion. The real world is a corporeal universe in constant movement, and phenomena, or events, the causes and effects of which it is the business of philosophy to lay bare, consist of either the action of physical bodies on each other or the quaint effects of physical bodies upon minds.

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From this assumption follows Hobbes’s classification of the fields that form the content of philosophy: (1) physics, (2) moral philosophy, and (3) civil philosophy. Physics is the science of the motions and actions of physical bodies conceived in terms of cause and effect. Moral philosophy (or, more accurately, psychology) is the detailed study of “the passions and perturbations of the mind”—that is, how minds are “moved” by desire, aversion, appetite, fear, anger, and envy. And civil philosophy deals with the concerted actions of people in a commonwealth—how, in detail, the wayward wills of human beings can be constrained by power (i.e., force) to prevent civil disorder and maintain peace.

Hobbes’s philosophy was a bold restatement of Greek atomistic materialism, with applications to the realities of early modern politics that would have seemed strange to its ancient authors. But there are also elements in it that make it characteristically English. Hobbes’s account of language led him to adopt nominalism and to deny the reality of abstract universals (i.e., a metaphysical entity used to explain what it is for things to share a feature, attribute, or quality or to fall under the same type or natural kind). Bacon’s general emphasis on experience also had its analogue in Hobbes’s theory that all knowledge arises from sense experiences, all of which are caused by the actions of physical bodies on the sense organs. Empiricism has long been a basic and recurrent feature of British intellectual life, and its nominalist and sensationalist roots were already clearly evident in both Bacon and Hobbes.

The rationalism of Descartes

The dominant philosophy of the last half of the 17th century was that of René Descartes (1596–1650). A crucial figure in the history of philosophy, Descartes combined (however unconsciously or even unwillingly) the influences of the past into a synthesis that was striking in its originality and yet congenial to the scientific temper of the age. In the minds of all later historians, he counts as the progenitor of the modern spirit of philosophy. Descartes was also a great mathematician—he invented analytic geometry—and the author of many important physical and anatomical experiments. He knew and profoundly respected the work of Galileo; indeed, he withdrew from publication his own cosmological treatise, The World, after Galileo’s condemnation by the Inquisition in 1633.

Bacon and Descartes, the founders of modern empiricism and rationalism, respectively, both subscribed to two pervasive tenets of the Renaissance: an enormous enthusiasm for physical science and the belief that knowledge means power—that the ultimate purpose of theoretical science is to serve the practical needs of human beings.

In his Principles of Philosophy (1644), Descartes defined philosophy as “the study of wisdom” or “the perfect knowledge of all one can know.” Its chief utility is “for the conduct of life” (morals), “the conservation of health” (medicine), and “the invention of all the arts” (mechanics). He expressed the relation of philosophy to practical endeavours in the famous metaphor of the “tree”: the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches are morals, medicine, and mechanics. The metaphor is revealing, for it indicates that for Descartes—as for Bacon and Galileo—the most important part of the tree was the trunk. In other words, Descartes busied himself with metaphysics only in order to provide a firm foundation for physics. Thus, the Discourse on Method (1637), which provides a synoptic view of the Cartesian philosophy, shows it to be not a metaphysics founded upon physics—as was the case with Aristotle (384–322 bce)— but rather a physics founded upon metaphysics.

Descartes’s mathematical bias was reflected in his determination to ground natural science not in sensation and probability (as did Bacon) but in premises that could be known with absolute certainty. Thus his metaphysics in essence consisted of three principles:

1. To employ the procedure of complete and systematic doubt to eliminate every belief that does not pass the test of indubitability (skepticism).
2. To accept no idea as certain that is not clear, distinct, and free of contradiction (mathematicism).
3. To found all knowledge upon the bedrock certainty of self-consciousness, so that the cogito (cogito, ergo sum; “I think, therefore I am,” or “I think, I am”) becomes the only innate idea unshakable by doubt (subjectivism).

From the indubitability of the self, Descartes inferred the existence of a perfect God, and, from the fact that a perfect being is incapable of falsification or deception, he concluded that the ideas about the physical world that God has implanted in human beings must be true. The achievement of certainty about the natural world was thus guaranteed by the perfection of God and by the “clear and distinct” ideas that are his gift.

Cartesian metaphysics is the fountainhead of rationalism in modern philosophy, for it suggests that the mathematical criteria of clarity, distinctness, and logical consistency are the ultimate test of meaningfulness and truth. This stance is profoundly antiempirical. Bacon, who remarked that “reasoners resemble spiders who make cobwebs out of their own substance,” might well have said the same of Descartes, for the Cartesian self is just such a substance. Yet for Descartes the understanding is vastly superior to the senses, and only reason can ultimately decide what constitutes truth in science.

Cartesianism dominated the intellectual life of continental Europe until the end of the 17th century. It was a fashionable philosophy, appealing to learned gentlemen and highborn ladies alike, and it was one of the few philosophical alternatives to the Scholasticism still being taught in the universities. Precisely for this reason it constituted a serious threat to established religious authority. In 1663 the Roman Catholic Church placed Descartes’s works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“Index of Forbidden Books”), and the University of Oxford forbade the teaching of his doctrines. Only in the liberal Dutch universities, such as those of Groningen and Utrecht, did Cartesianism make serious headway.

Certain features of Cartesian philosophy made it an important starting point for subsequent philosophical speculation. As a kind of meeting point for medieval and modern worldviews, it accepted the doctrines of Renaissance science while attempting to ground them metaphysically in medieval notions of God and the human mind. Thus, a certain dualism between God the Creator and the mechanistic world of his creation, between mind as a spiritual principle and matter as mere spatial extension, was inherent in the Cartesian position. An entire generation of Cartesians—among them Arnold Geulincx (1624–69), Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)—wrestled with the resulting problem of how interaction between two such radically different entities is possible.

The rationalism of Spinoza and Leibniz

The tradition of Continental rationalism was carried on by two philosophers of genius: the Dutch Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77) and his younger contemporary Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), a Leipzig scholar and polymath. Whereas Bacon’s philosophy had been a search for method in science and Descartes’s basic aim had been the achievement of scientific certainty, Spinoza’s speculative system was one of the most comprehensive of the early modern period. In certain respects Spinoza had much in common with Hobbes: a mechanistic worldview and even a political philosophy that sought political stability in centralized power. Yet Spinoza introduced a conception of philosophizing that was new to the Renaissance; philosophy became a personal and moral quest for wisdom and the achievement of human perfection.

Spinoza’s magnum opus, the Ethics (1677), borrowed much from Descartes: the goal of a rational understanding of principles, the terminology of “substance” and “clear and distinct ideas,” and the expression of philosophical knowledge in a complete deductive system using the geometric model of the Elements of Euclid (flourished c. 300 bce). Spinoza conceived of the universe pantheistically as a single infinite substance, which he called “God,” with the dual attributes (or aspects) of thought and extension (see pantheism). Extension is differentiated into plural “modes,” or particular things, and the world as a whole possesses the properties of a timeless logical system—a complex of completely determined causes and effects. For Spinoza, the wisdom that philosophy seeks is ultimately achieved when one perceives the universe in its wholeness through the “intellectual love of God,” which merges the finite individual with eternal unity and provides the mind with the pure joy that is the final achievement of its search.

Whereas the basic elements of the Spinozistic worldview are given in the Ethics, Leibniz’s philosophy must be pieced together from numerous brief expositions, which seem to be mere philosophical interludes in an otherwise busy life. But the philosophical form is deceptive. Leibniz was a mathematician (he and Isaac Newton independently invented the infinitesimal calculus), a jurist (he codified the laws of Mainz), a diplomat, a historian to royalty, and a court librarian in a princely house. Yet he was also one of the most original philosophers of the early modern period. His chief contributions were in the fields of logic, in which he was a truly brilliant innovator, and metaphysics, in which he provided a rationalist alternative to the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza.

Leibniz conceived of logic as a mathematical calculus. He was the first to distinguish “truths of reason” from “truths of fact” and to contrast the necessary propositions of logic and mathematics, which hold in all “possible worlds,” with the contingent propositions of science, which hold only in some possible worlds (including the actual world). He saw clearly that, as the first kind of proposition is governed by the principle of contradiction (a proposition and its negation cannot both be true), the second is governed by the principle of sufficient reason (nothing exists or is the case without a sufficient reason).

In metaphysics, Leibniz’s pluralism contrasted with Descartes’s dualism and Spinoza’s monism (see pluralism and monism). Leibniz posited the existence of an infinite number of spiritual substances, which he called “monads,” each different, each a percipient of the universe around it, and each mirroring that universe from its own point of view. However, the differences between Leibniz’s philosophy and that of Descartes and Spinoza are less significant than their similarities, in particular their extreme rationalism. In the Principes de la nature et de la grâce fondés en raison (1714; “Principles of Nature and of Grace Founded in Reason”), Leibniz stated a maxim that could fairly represent the entire school:

True reasoning depends upon necessary or eternal truths, such as those of logic, numbers, geometry, which establish an indubitable connection of ideas and unfailing consequences.

Classical British empiricism

Two major philosophical problems remained: to provide an account of the origins of reason and to shift its application from the physical universe to human nature. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was devoted to the first, and Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), “being an attempt to apply the method of experimental reasoning to moral subjects,” was devoted to the second.

These two basic tasks represented a new direction for philosophy since the late Renaissance. The Renaissance preoccupation with the natural world had constituted a certain “realistic” bias. Hobbes and Spinoza had each produced a metaphysics. They had been interested in the real constitution of the physical world. Moreover, the Renaissance enthusiasm for mathematics had resulted in a profound interest in rational principles, necessary propositions, and innate ideas. As attention was turned from the realities of nature to the structure of the mind that knows it so successfully, philosophers of the Enlightenment focused on the sensory and experiential components of knowledge rather than on the merely mathematical. Thus, whereas the philosophy of the late Renaissance had been metaphysical and rationalistic, that of the Enlightenment was epistemological and empiricist. The school of British empiricism—John Locke, George Berkeley (1685–1753), and David Hume (1711–76)—dominated the perspective of Enlightenment philosophy until the time of Kant.

Reason in Locke and Berkeley

Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding marked a decisively new direction for modern philosophizing because it proposed what amounts to a new criterion of truth. Locke’s aim in his essay—“to inquire into the origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge”—involved three tasks:

1. To discover the origin of human ideas.
2. To determine their certainty and evidential value.
3. To examine the claims of all knowledge that is less than certain.

What was crucial for Locke, however, was that the second task is dependent upon the first. Following the general Renaissance custom, Locke defined an idea as a mental entity: “whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks.” But whereas for Descartes and the entire rationalist school the certainty of ideas had been a function of their self-evidence—i.e., of their clarity and distinctness—for Locke their validity depended expressly on the mode and manner of their origin. Thus, an intrinsic criterion of truth and validity was replaced with a genetic one.

Locke’s exhaustive survey of mental contents is useful, if elaborate. Although he distinguished between ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection, the thrust of his efforts and those of his empiricist followers was to reduce the latter to the former, to minimize the originative power of the mind in favour of its passive receptivity to the sensory impressions received from without. Locke’s classification of ideas into “simple” and “complex” was an attempt to distinguish mental contents that are derived directly from one or more of the senses (such as blueness or solidity, which come from a single sense such as sight or touch, and figure, space, extension, rest, and motion, which are the product of several senses combined) from complicated and compounded ideas of universals (such as triangle and gratitude), substances, and relations (such as identity, diversity, and cause and effect).

Locke’s Essay was a dogged attempt to produce the total world of human conceptual experience from a set of elementary sensory building blocks, moving always from sensation toward thought and from the simple to the complex. The basic outcome of his epistemology was therefore:

1. That the ultimate source of human ideas is sense experience.
2. That all mental operations are a combining and compounding of simple sensory materials into complex conceptual entities.

Locke’s theory of knowledge was based upon a kind of sensory atomism, in which the mind is an agent of discovery rather than of creation, and ideas are “like” the objects they represent, which in turn are the sources of the sensations the mind receives. Locke’s theory also made the important distinction between “primary qualities” (such as solidity, figure, extension, motion, and rest), which are real properties of physical objects, and “secondary qualities” (such as colour, taste, and smell), which are merely the effects of such real properties on the mind.

It was precisely this dualism of primary and secondary qualities that Locke’s successor, George Berkeley, sought to overcome. Although Berkeley was a bishop in the Anglican church who professed a desire to combat atheistic materialism, his importance for the theory of knowledge lies rather in the way in which he demonstrated that, in the end, primary qualities are reducible to secondary qualities. His empiricism led to a denial of abstract ideas because he believed that general notions are simply fictions of the mind. Science, he argued, can easily dispense with the concept of matter: nature is simply that which human beings perceive through their sense faculties. This means that sense experiences themselves can be considered “objects for the mind.” A physical object, therefore, is simply a recurrent group of sense qualities. With this important reduction of substance to quality, Berkeley became the father of the epistemological position known as phenomenalism, which has remained an important influence in British philosophy to the present day.

Basic science of human nature in Hume

The third, and in many ways the most important, of the British empiricists was the skeptic David Hume. Hume’s philosophical intention was to reap, humanistically, the harvest sowed by Newtonian physics, to apply the method of natural science to human nature. The paradoxical result of this admirable goal, however, was a devastating skeptical crisis.

Hume followed Locke and Berkeley in approaching the problem of knowledge from a psychological perspective. He too found the origin of knowledge in sense experience. But whereas Locke had found a certain trustworthy order in the compounding power of the mind, and Berkeley had found mentality itself expressive of a certain spiritual power, Hume’s relentless analysis discovered as much contingency in mind as in the external world. All uniformity in perceptual experience, he held, comes from “an associating quality of the mind.” The “association of ideas” is a fact, but the relations of resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect that it produces have no intrinsic validity because they are merely the product of “mental habit.” Thus, the causal principle upon which all knowledge rests represents no necessary connections between things but is simply the result of their constant conjunction in human minds. Moreover, the mind itself, far from being an independent power, is simply “a bundle of perceptions” without unity or cohesive quality. Hume’s denial of a necessary order of nature on the one hand and of a substantial or unified self on the other precipitated a philosophical crisis from which Enlightenment philosophy was not to be rescued until the work of Kant.

Nonepistemological movements in the Enlightenment

Although the school of British empiricism represented the mainstream of Enlightenment philosophy until the time of Kant, it was by no means the only type of philosophy that the 18th century produced. The Enlightenment, which was based upon a few great fundamental ideas—such as the dedication to reason, the belief in intellectual progress, the confidence in nature as a source of inspiration and value, and the search for tolerance and freedom in political and social institutions—generated many crosscurrents of intellectual and philosophical expression.

Social and political philosophy

Apart from epistemology, the most significant philosophical contributions of the Enlightenment were made in the fields of social and political philosophy. The Two Treatises of Civil Government (1690) by Locke and The Social Contract (1762) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) proposed justifications of political association grounded in the newer political requirements of the age. The Renaissance and early modern political philosophies of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Jean Bodin (1530–96), and Hobbes had presupposed or defended the absolute power of kings and rulers. But the Enlightenment theories of Locke and Rousseau championed the freedom and equality of citizens. It was a natural historical transformation. The 16th and 17th centuries were the age of absolutism; the chief problem of politics was that of maintaining internal order, and political theory was conducted in the language of national sovereignty. But the 18th century was the age of the democratic revolutions; the chief political problem was that of securing freedom and revolting against injustice, and political theory was expressed in the idiom of natural and inalienable rights.

Locke’s political philosophy explicitly denied the divine right of kings and the absolute power of the sovereign. Instead, he insisted on a natural and universal right to freedom and equality. The state of nature in which human beings originally lived was not, as Hobbes imagined, intolerable, though it did have certain inconveniences. Therefore, people banded together to form society—as Aristotle taught, “not simply to live, but to live well.” Political power, Locke argued, can never be exercised apart from its ultimate purpose, which is the common good, for the political contract is undertaken in order to preserve life, liberty, and property.

Locke thus stated one of the fundamental principles of political liberalism: that there can be no subjection to power without consent—though once political society has been founded, citizens are obligated to accept the decisions of a majority of their number. Such decisions are made on behalf of the majority by the legislature, though the ultimate power of choosing the legislature rests with the people; and even the powers of the legislature are not absolute, because the law of nature remains as a permanent standard and as a principle of protection against arbitrary authority.

Rousseau’s more radical political doctrines were built upon Lockean foundations. For him, too, the convention of the social contract formed the basis of all legitimate political authority, though his conception of citizenship was much more organic and much less individualistic than Locke’s. The surrender of natural liberty for civil liberty means that all individual rights (among them property rights) become subordinate to the general will. For Rousseau the state is a moral person whose life is the union of its members, whose laws are acts of the general will, and whose end is the liberty and equality of its citizens. It follows that when any government usurps the power of the people, the social contract is broken; and not only are the citizens no longer compelled to obey, but they also have an obligation to rebel. Rousseau’s defiant collectivism was clearly a revolt against Locke’s systematic individualism; for Rousseau the fundamental category was not “natural person” but “citizen.” Nevertheless, however much they differed, in these two social theorists of the Enlightenment is to be found the germ of all modern liberalism: its faith in representative democracy, in civil liberties, and in the basic dignity of human beings.

Critical examination of reason in Kant

All these developments led directly to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, whose works mark the true culmination of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Historically speaking, Kant’s great contribution was to elucidate both the sensory and the a priori elements in knowledge and thus to bridge the gap between the extreme rationalism of Leibniz and the extreme empiricism of Hume. But in addition to the brilliant content of his philosophical doctrines, Kant was responsible for three crucial philosophical innovations: (1) a new definition of philosophy, (2) a new conception of philosophical method, and (3) a new structural model for the writing of philosophy.

Kant conceived of reason as being at the very heart of the philosophical enterprise. Philosophy’s sole task, in his view, is to determine what reason can and cannot do. Philosophy, he said, “is the science of the relation of all knowledge to the essential ends of human reason”; its true aim is both constructive (“to outline the system of all knowledge arising from pure reason”) and critical (“to expose the illusions of a reason that forgets its limits”). Philosophy is thus a calling of great dignity, for its aim is wisdom, and its practitioners are themselves “lawgivers of reason.” But in order for philosophy to be “the science of the highest maxims of reason,” the philosopher must be able to determine the source, the extent, and the validity of human knowledge and the ultimate limits of reason. And these tasks require a special philosophical method.

Sometimes Kant called this the “transcendental method,” but more often the “critical method.” His purpose was to reject the dogmatic assumptions of the rationalist school, and his wish was to return to the semiskeptical position with which Descartes had begun before his dogmatic pretensions to certainty took hold. Kant’s method was to conduct a critical examination of the powers of a priori reason—an inquiry into what reason can achieve when all experience is removed. His method was based on a doctrine that he himself called “a Copernican revolution” in philosophy (by analogy with the shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism in cosmology): the assumption that objects must conform to human knowledge—or to the human apparatus of knowing—rather than that human knowledge must conform to objects. The question then became: What is the exact nature of this knowing apparatus?

Unlike Descartes, Kant could not question that knowledge exists. No one raised in the Enlightenment could doubt, for example, that mathematics and Newtonian physics were real. Kant’s methodological question was rather: How is mathematical and physical knowledge possible? How must human knowledge be structured in order to make these sciences secure? The attempt to answer these questions was the task of Kant’s great work Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

Kant’s aim was to examine reason not merely in one of its domains but in each of its employments according to the threefold structure of the human mind. Thus the critical examination of reason in thinking (science) is undertaken in the Critique of Pure Reason, that of reason in willing (ethics) in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and that of reason in feeling (aesthetics) in the Critique of Judgment (1790).