CONTRIBUTION OF MODERN THINKERS
Renaissance & The Age of Reason (1500-1750)
Time line 1513- Machiavelli publishes The Prince 1517- Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses 1543- Copernicus proposes earth orbits the sun 1593- Edict of Nantes giving rights to Protestants
Time line 1620- Bacon proposes new approach to investigating nature 1633- Galileo imprisoned 1641- Descartes propounds 1651- Hobbes publishes Leviathan 1664- Newton complies his notes 1690- Locke publishes An Essay concerning Human Understanding
1721
Machiavelli (1469-1527) Since my intention is to say something that will be of practical use to the enquirer, I have thought it proper to represent things as they are imagined.
Machiavelli (1469-1527) Duties of a ruler What sort of person would constitute an ideal prince What would be the most desirable form of society BUT THEY NOT ABOUT DAY-TO-DAY ACTIVITIES OF POLITICS
Machiavelli (1469-1527) The end justifies the means
Key Works Discusses how a new prince can build up his power A ruler needs to know how to act like a beast, and must imitate the qualities of the Fox & Lion
Key Works Discusses the arguments for and against different forms of government
Contributions Brought realism into politics (ruler cannot be bound by morality) Described the things human beings do to get power and keep it Illustrated various ways in which individuals lose power
Contributions Dealt with the central role force plays in politics Pointed out the importance of appearance & image making Importance of word, when to give one and when to break it
it is more important for a prince to be feared than to be loved
The wisest, brightest, meanest of Mankind
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Distinguished in politics, law, literature, philosophy, science At 23 became MP, Solicitor General, Attorney General, etc.
Science not Religion
Key Works How men live? What men do? What men ought to do?
Key Works Review of the state of knowledge at his time
Key Works Presented his scientific method
Contributions First to see that scientific knowledge could give men power over nature Rationalist thinkers were spiders, while empirical thinkers were ants Controlled, systematic procedure was needed for advancing knowledge of natural world.
Scientific Method We must observe the facts, record and amass a body of reliable data (must not impose our ideas on facts) The data on perusal will display patterns, causal connections Generation of hypothesis
Scientific Method In the process of discovering scientific law we are moving from the PARTICULAR to GENERAL, and this method is known as INDUCTION
False Idols Idols of Tribe These are distorting factors inherent in our nature as human beings Refers to our tendency to believe our senses Our judgments are colored by our own feelings Impose interpretations based on our own ideas
False Idols Idols of the Cave Each individual has his own private den or cavern, which interprets and colors the light of nature according to his peculiar disposition
False Idols Idols of the market place Exchanges between human beings and are mediated by language Words deceive (1) same words mean different things to different people (2) human have a tendency to confuse reality with language
False Idols Idols of the theatre These are systematic representations of reality which are in fact not reality at all. These are various systems of philosophy in terms of which people mistakenly look at reality
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) Fear & I were born twins Witness to Elizabeth I rule, Stuarts, whole of English civil war. Briefly he was tutor to king Charles II
Key Works
What life would be without govt.? STATE OF NATURE
Contributions It is fear that causes human beings to form societies Without society, life is war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes) Man get out of it by covenants without sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all
Contributions To secure everyone s interest, everyone must agree to hand over power to a central authority whose job it is to impose law and to punish severely any law breakers. This is the only way to maximize liberty & security
Contributions This supreme authority holds its power from the people themselves Absolute power is given to the sovereign not for gratification of the sovereign but for the good of all.
Contributions Absolutism for the sovereign NO SEPARATION OF POWERS
Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677)
Contributions
Contributions Defended free expression Freedom of speech far from being incompatible with public order, was necessary in order to secure it In a rationally governed society every man may think what he likes, and say what he thinks
Contributions The real disturbers of peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over. The true aim of government is Liberty
John Locke (1632-1704) Classical liberalism Empiricist Social contract theory
Works No man s knowledge here can go beyond his experience
Empiricism Rationalists believe that we are born with some ideas and concepts; that they are innate But this is not borne out by the fact There are no truths that are found in everyone at birth There are no universal ideas found in people of all cultures at all times EVERYTHING WE KNOW IS GAINED FROM EXPERIENCE.
Education for All
Toleration
Toleration Earthly judges, the state in particular, and human beings generally, cannot dependably evaluate the truth-claims of competing religious standpoints Even if they could, enforcing a single "true religion" would not have the desired effect, because belief cannot be compelled by violence Coercing religious uniformity would lead to more social disorder than allowing diversity
Political Ideas Mankind began in a state of nature. Man was not a jungle beast, he had reason and conscience Individuals came together voluntarily to create a society. The social contract was between free men and the governed retained individual rights even after government has been set up
Political Ideas Protection of life, liberty and property of all is the sole legitimate purpose of the government The governed retain a moral right to overthrow the government and replace it with one that does the job properly.
Timeline 1759: Voltaire publishes Candide 1762: Rousseau s Social Contract published 1763: The Treaty of Paris makes Britain the main colonial power in North America 1776: American declaration of Independence
Timeline 1780: Bentham develops the theory of Utilitarianism 1781: Kant publishes his Critique of Pure Reason 1789: storming of Bastille 1802: Napoleon Bonaparte
Timeline 1848: Marx publishes Communist Manifesto 1859: Darwin publishes the Origin of Species 1861: Mill publishes Utilitarianism 1880 s: Large scale colonization of African Continent 1890: William James publishes The Principles of Psychology
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Background Age of enlightenment; period characterized by an intense questioning of the world and how people live in it Questioned the authority of Church and State Scientists and philosophers began to demonstrate different approaches to establishing the Truth
Certainty is Absurd He points out that apart from a few necessary truths of mathematics and logic, nearly fact and theory in history has been revised at some point in time. So what is fact is actually little more than working hypothesis
Core Idea Every fact and theory in history has been revised at some point We are not born with ideas and concepts already in our heads Every idea and theory can be challenged Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd
Contribution Important to challenge every fact and all authority Government should be limited Uncensored speech Science and education leads to material and moral progress
Jean Jacques Rousseau
His Works Discourses on the Sciences and Arts Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men Discourse on Political Economy The Social Contract
Discourses on Sci. & Arts Has the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to refining moral practices? The arts and sciences corrupt and erode morals They have decreased human virtue and happiness
Discourses on the origin & foundations of Inequality among men The selfish, savage and unjust state of nature depicted by Hobbes is a description not of natural man but of civilized man. Civil society that induces this savage state Humanity s natural state is innocent, happy and independent: MAN IS BORN FREE
Society Corrupts The state of nature that Rousseau talks about is where people in their natural state are fundamentally good People are endowed with innate virtues and attributes of compassion and empathy The power of reason begins to separate humankind from the rest of nature, people become detached from their natural virtues
Society Corrupts The imposition of civil society entails a move away from virtue towards vice and from happiness towards misery He sees the fall from nature as a consequence of human capacity to reason
Society Corrupts The process began when man enclosed a piece of land for the first time for himself (introducing the notion of private property) As groups of people began to live side by side they formed societies which could only be maintained through a system of laws
Society Corrupts As laws are introduced every society losses touch with humanity s natural virtues, including empathy and so imposes laws that are not just but selfish. They are designed to protect property and they are inflicted on poor by the rich
Society Corrupts The move from a natural to a civilized state therefore brought about a move not only from virtue to vice but also from freedom and innocence to injustice and enslavement
The Social Contract Man is born free, yet everywhere he is chains He then sets out his vision of an alternative civil society, run not by aristocrats, the monarchy and the Church, but by all citizens who participate in the business of legislation
The Social Contract He imagines the citizen body operating as unit prescribing laws according to general will. The laws would arise from all and apply to all- everyone would be considered equal. Freedom to take part in legislative process would lead to elimination of inequality and injustice. It would promote a feeling of belonging to society- that would lead to LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY
On Education Education was responsible for corrupting the state of nature Perpetuating evils of modern society Promoted EDUCATION OF THE SENSES rather than intellect
Adam Smith 1723-1790
Life Father of modern economics The theory of moral sentiments The wealth of nations Essays on Philosophical Subjects
Bargain Human motives are partly self-interest and partly benevolent But self interest is the stronger trait so is a better guide to human behavior Opening gambit in Bargaining: The best way for you to get what you want is for you to give me what I want
Bargain Exchange of useful objects is a distinctively human characteristic Humans exchange and bargain because life requires the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes. MAN IS AN ANIMAL THAT MAKES BARGAINS
Division of Labor Our ability to make bargains put an end to the once universal requirement that every person be economically self sufficient Thanks to bargaining it became possible for us to concentrate on producing fewer and fewer goods and exchange this for everything else we required
Division of Labor This brought everyone to the market place to exchange their labor or the money earned through labor This led to emergence of specialization and division of labor
Free Market Because the division of labor increases productivity and makes it possible for everyone to be eligible for some kind of work This can lead to universal wealth in a well ordered society. He says, in conditions of perfect liberty the market can lead to a state of perfect equality-one in which everyone is free to pursue his own interests in his own way
Free Market By equality, he refers to equality of condition rather than equality of opportunity His goal is the creation of a society not divided by competitiveness, but drawn together by bargaining based on self interest.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
Mary Wollstonecraft Mind has no Gender
Mary Wollstonecraft If men and women are given the same education they will acquire the same good character and rational approach to life, because they have fundamentally similar brains and minds. Demanded that women be treated as equal citizens to men- with equal legal, social and political rights
Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862
Thoreau Must the citizen ever resign his conscience to the legislator?
Thoreau (1817-1862) All good things are wild and free Laws of man suppresses rather than protects civil liberties He saw that political parties were necessarily one sided and that their policies often ran contrary to our moral beliefs.
Thoreau (1817-1862) For this reason he believed it was the individual s duty to protest against unjust laws and passively allowing such laws to be enacted effectively gave them justification Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
Thoreau (1817-1862) In Civil Disobedience, an essay written in 1849 he proposed a citizen s right to objection through non-cooperation and non-violent resistance which he put in practice by refusing to pay taxes that supported the war in Mexico and perpetuated slavery.
Timeline 1906: Albert Einstein introduces his Theory of Relativity 1907: Edmund Husserl publishes The Idea of Phenomenology 1908: Henry Ford produces the Model T Ford, world s first mass produced car
Timeline 1910-13: Bertrand Russell publishes The Principles of Mathematics 1914-18: World War I 1917: The October Revolution 1922: Stalin is made General Secretary of Communist Party in Russia
Timeline 1923: Psychoanalyst Freud publishes The Ego and the Id 1927: Martin Heidegger publishes Being and Time 1929: Wall Street Crash 1934: Karl Popper publishes The Logic of Scientific Discovery
Timeline 1939-45: II World War 1943: Jean Paul Sartre publishes Being & Nothingness 1949: Mao proclaims PRC
John Dewey 1859-1952
Pragmatism A school of philosophy which arose in the late 19 th century, Charles Sanders Peirce is considered to be the founder It starts from the position that the purpose of philosophy or thinking is not to provide us with true picture of the world, but to help us to act more effectively within it.
Dewey s Position Philosophical problems are not abstract problems divorced from people s lives He sees them as problems that occur because humans are living beings trying to make sense of their world, struggling to decide how best to act within it.
Dewey s Position Philosophy starts from our everyday human hopes and aspirations and from problems that arise in the course of our lives Philosophy should be about finding practical responses to these problems Philosophizing is not about being a spectator who looks at the world from afar, but about actively engaging in the problems of life.
Evolving Creatures Like the other animals, humans have evolved in response to their changing environments We are not souls who belong in some other non-material world but evolved organisms who are trying to do our best to survive in a world of which we are inescapably a part.
Everything Changes We are organisms that find ourselves having to respond to a world that is subject to constant change and flux. EXISTENCE IS A RISK OR A GAMBLE AND THE WORLD IS FUNDAMENTALLY UNSTABLE. We depend upon our environment to be able to survive and thrive, but environment in itself changing
Everything Changes In face of uncertainty we adopt 2 strategies: Appeal to higher beings and hidden forces in the universe to help We can seek to understand the world and gain control over our environment
Everything Changes It is important to realize that we can never completely control our environment or transform it to such an extent that we can drive out all uncertainty Life is inescapably risky
On Education My Pedagogic Creed (1897) The School and Society (1900) The Child and the Curriculum (1902) Democracy and Education (1916) Experience and Education (1938)
"to prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities"
William Du Bois 1868-1963
William Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk (1903) The Negro (1915) The Gift of Black Folk (1924) Dusk of Dawn (1940)
Du Bois Two major impediments to a life of excellence Racism Social inequality Racial inequality has no basis on biological science, he regards it as a purely social problem, one that can be addressed only by committed political and social activism
Du Bois We aspire to a broader and fuller life To attain this we need to believe in the possibility of progress If we lose this belief we suffer a form of death: existence without growth. So we must believe in life.
Martin Heidegger 1889-1976
What it is like to be a human? We exist in the thick of things-in the midst of lifeif we want to understand what it is to be human, we have to do so by looking at human life from within this life. If we want to explore questions of being, we have to start with ourselves by looking at WHAT IT MEANS FOR US TO EXIST
Being & Time The meaning of our being must be tied up with time; we are essentially temporal beings When we are born, we find ourselves in the world as if we had been thrown here on a trajectory we have not chosen We simply find that we have come to exist, in an ongoing world that pre-existed us
Being & Time At our birth we are presented with a particular historical, material and spiritual environment. We attempt to make sense of this world be engaging in various past times Through these time consuming projects we literally project ourselves towards different possible futures; we define our existence
Being & Time We become aware that there is an outermost limit to all our projects, a point at which everything we plan will come to an end, whether finished or unfinished. This point is the point of our death.
Living Authentically When we live life purely in terms of the projects in which we are engaged, we miss the fundamental dimension of our existence When we become aware of death as the ultimate limit of our possibilities, we start to reach a deeper understanding of what it means to exist.
Hannah Arendt 1906-1975
Banality of Evil
A failure of judgment Evil does not come from malevolence or a delight in doing wrong. The reasons people act in such ways is that they fall victims to failures of thinking and judgment
A failure of judgment Oppressive political systems are able to take advantage of our tendencies towards such failures, and can make acts that we might usually consider to be unthinkable seem normal.
Simone De Beauvoir 1908-1986
Simone de Beauvoir Self or I of philosophical knowledge is by default male, and his binary pair-the female- is therefore something else, which she calls the Other. The Self is active and knowing, whereas the Other is all that the Self rejects: passivity, voicelessness and powerlessness
Simone de Beauvoir We are born without purpose and must carve out an authentic existence for ourselves, choosing what to become. We are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women One is not born woman but becomes woman
Simone de Beauvoir Women must free themselves both from the idea that they must like men, and from passivity that society has induced in them.
Many myths