Exploring 18th-Century Philosophy: Key Thinkers and Concepts
Philosophical Context of Kant
Immanuel Kant was born and died in Königsberg. His thought, formed in the 18th century, represents a period of relative peace in Europe between the wars of religion of the 17th century. A new mode of government emerged: despotism. It is the century of the Enlightenment, a cultural movement whose slogan, formed by Kant, was ‘Dare to know!’ The Enlightenment is a draft of emancipation of man from all the powers that oppress reason. The basis of this project is knowledge, which crystallized in the encyclopedia.
Obstacles should be exceeded; the largest in the Enlightenment is the lack of political culture. The Enlightenment is not limited to illustrating intelligence; it aims to transform society into an order of law based on reason and freedom, preparing the way for the French Revolution (1789). It is important to uncouple the influence of Rousseau, which resulted in a mentality contrary to the scientistic point. In Kant’s mentality, knowledge of Rousseau convinced him that scientific knowledge is not sufficient to make men better.
To understand the philosophy of the 18th century, we must consider empiricist philosophy (Locke-Hume), which denies innate ideas and argues that our ideas are rooted in experience. Kant’s philosophy aims to overcome these two positions, against empiricism and rationalism, which will lead to skepticism. Its theoretical use means that we must abandon the claim to go beyond the limits of experience. But, as I said, there will also be rationalism that recognizes the value of those conditions that lead to knowledge. Kant, in what was called the Copernican Revolution, will carry you through the rationalists and empiricists, skepticism and dogmatism, and open a new era. Until that moment, they had tried to explain knowledge from the subject, which was to turn around the object. Kant invested, saying that the goal should revolve around the subject.
Kant, as a good philosopher of the Enlightenment, does not reduce his academic dimension but refers it to a public whose function is to help form public opinion through the exercise of criticism in the fields of politics, art, and religion.
Development of Ethics in Kant’s Philosophy
Kant is one of the greatest geniuses of philosophy. He lists some salient features of artwork, supports the necessary right of self-employment, which is a requirement of the emancipation of all possible guardianships. Kant argues that nature has endowed men with rational faculties and autonomy of reason.
Marx: Influences and Key Concepts
- Philosophical Influences: The dialectic method of Hegel. Hegel’s idealistic dialectic as a structure of reality and method of knowledge. The dialectic is real, and reality drives thought (negation). It is the thesis (affirmation), antithesis (negation), and synthesis (negation of negation) that suppresses the initial idea, conserves it, and surpasses it. No dialectic is perfect. Absolute knowledge affirms its spiritual dialectical deployment. Truth is the whole.
- Feuerbach’s Anthropotheism: A critique of Hegel. He emphasizes earthly life (material, sensible), aligning it with religion, proposing the consideration of change in the human being, anthropocentric.
- Utopian Socialists: Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier.
- Scientific Socialism: Marx and Engels, overcoming and rejecting ineffective and insufficient utopian ideas.
- Classical Economics: Adam Smith.
- Darwinian Evolution: Matter is the unique and absolute reality. Human evolution is unique through labor.
Marx’s Humanism
Material Production Practice: Knowing and interpreting reality is not essentially and universally a human condition. Primarily, it must be practical and productive (praxis and material). Human activity is principal. Marx is interested in the practical dimension of man, the productive (working) dimension, explicitly excluding theoretical knowledge. Consideration of ideological work in various historical epochs. The concept of praxis identifies the following anthropology: man is natural in a biological sense, with a division of technical labor, a social life, and an economic life. Through praxis, man becomes a historical being.
Alienation and its Forms: Entfremdung, loss of self. Man becomes a subject of his own actions, and they do not belong to him or make him happy; he is controlled by external economic forces. The origin of all alienation is the dependence of work in capitalism. Alienation of labor (objects of work do not belong to you, they are strangers). Alienation with respect to activity (work is alien to man). Alienation with respect to nature (nature turns outside of man). Alienation with respect to other men. Political alienation (individual and state are opposed, justifying capitalism).
Historical Materialism and Dialectical Materialism
Dialectical Materialism: Marx’s philosophy of nature. Truth about the unquestionable profound meaning of natural concepts. It unites the material, proceeding from materialistic thought of the nineteenth century, a concept taken from Hegel. It exposes the subject, the laws that govern it: the law of conversion of quantity into quality, the law of the dislocated unity of contraries, and the law of the negation of negation.
Historical Materialism: The main idea of the succession of modes of production confers meaning to history. Its base is the economic structure. The science of history: historical materialism sits on the dialectical characterization of social history (the negation and opposition of dialectical contraries is given in the reality field: Nature (dialectical materialism), society, and history). Historicism (reality is historical; understanding reality is understanding history). The philosophy that correctly understands history is not positivist or idealist but materialist. Historical materialism is the only scientific conception of history, society, and human phenomena. Economicism (in general, scientific causes explain what happens historically in society and economics). Determinism (with precision, we can know the causes of a transition from one mode of production to another and predict how the capitalist mode of production will step into socialism).
Categories of Historical Materialism
- Productive Forces: Human labor force, raw materials, technical means.
- Relations of Production: Economic and juridical relations that men establish in a determined way of producing.
- Economic Structure: Productive forces and relations of production.
- Superstructure: Symbolic representations, configuration of ideology, ideas, and values of a society, political-legal framework.
- Mode of Production: Social organization of production.
- Social Formation: All the above categories.
- Social Revolution: Crisis, destruction, and substitution of the superstructure, motor of history, dislocated class.
David Hume: Empiricism and Skepticism
David Hume was a British philosopher and historian (1711-1776), born in Scotland. His philosophy, influenced by Berkeley, developed Locke’s doctrine and reached total skepticism. He is one of the most important figures of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Among his works is A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.
Ideas and Impressions
Hume believes that all human knowledge comes from the senses. Our perceptions, as he called them, can be divided into two categories: ideas and impressions.
Impression: This is the actual presence of an image or feeling in coexistence. These are divided into two classes: those of sensation (original) and reflection (secondary).
Idea: the mental representation that we make of things.
For Hume the concept of Idea are weakened images of ideas.
For Hume the concept of printing is the first evidence of the mind whose changes give rise to other perceptions that appear there. They are sensations, passions and emotions that affect the force and vivacity in our mind.
This is an important aspect of Hume’s skepticism, as to say that we can be certain that a thing as God, the soul or self, there is unless we can draw the impression that this idea is derived . METAPHYSICS Hume means in real philosophy about reflection and abstract, no matter how complicated this is about human nature wing in their capacity for knowledge, ie, building the capacities limitation of human knowledge. It is from here that this valid metaphysics or philosophy can help science, pointing to and where they can focus their research. / / Hume’s metaphysics since the establishment of human knowledge determines the border until you can get the scientific quest. / / Metaphysics in Hume is valid in this sense but rejects metaphysics that seeks to investigate and discover the ultimate nature of reality of what is and exists. Because this knowledge is neither a relation of ideas or a matter of fact. It is necessary relationships between ideas or concepts which are governed by logical criteria established also by the mind, not of facts or phenomena that we can experience directly. So are opinions without foundation and without Causapé Hume consistencia.Idea of causation, does not express necessary relations between facts, not a supposed power in the cause to bring up the effect. Our beliefs are based on causal links in the habit or custom of an event hope that you will follow another after repeated experience that this has been so far.
The criticism of Hume to the idea of cause knowledge of facts and the idea of cause. Our knowledge of the facts is limited to past impressions, but there can be no knowledge of future events because we have no impression of what will happen in the future. b) Causality and “necessary connection”. the idea of cause is thus the basis of our indifference about the facts of which do not have a current print, is the so-called cause-effect relationship. Hume observed that this ratio is normally conceived as a necessary connection between cause and effect. As this connection is necessary, we can know with certainty that there will necessarily effect. c) He criticizes the idea of necessary connection. For Hume the true idea is one that corresponds to a print. He claims not to have an impression that corresponds to this idea of necessary connection between cause and effect. / / According to Hume the certainty of the connection between cause and effect comes from habit, custom, having observed in the past that always happens first and the second.
2.DESCARTES
Opens the call modern philosophy. Developed a new vision of what it means thinking and reality. For what are the things there and I, I think about them, this is realism. The ideas are a necessary tool for the mind knows external things. It questions the existence of everything except the existence of the thinking self. This is an idealism nuevo.La rationalism philosophy departs from common sense. For philosophy is as a tree (metaphysical roots, trunk and branches of other physical sciences) and the mates are the lifeblood for the tree. Mov arises. known as the philosophical and scientific rationalism (theories of some thinkers that have several points in common, as Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz) agree: 1) The model of science are mates.invento analytic geometry. 2) The theory of the innateness of ideas. innate ideas are the basic and fundamental of all science and knowledge, which is opposed to empiricism. The main creator of rationalism is Discard => Cartesian rationalism. dl lived in the late Renaissance with the skepticism was widespread. Descartes for any criterion of certainty to emerge from this inseguridad.La buskeda of certainty is the search for a method and the method+ Insurance, is the mathematical method. In this way the philosophy ends up being a method. which has the following rules: 1) the evidence. 2) the analysis 3) the synthesis of (since + simple + complex) .4) enumerations. Certainly applied to all things: 1) doubt the data offered by the sentidos.2) doubt the existence of body.3) possibility of the outside world is falso.4) xq doubt the math is a hoax of a evil genius. Cartesian doubt is the boost renewal of spirit cn moderate and distrust which the burguesia.A live despite these assumptions, while I’m there. I may be mistaken, xro to be deceived I exist “cogito ergo sun”. The cogito is a true principle, xro q is the only thing you discard the q x can not make a philosophy cn esto.es a certainty, must become zero an approach we analyze the x pripiedades the cogito: 1) clarity. the cogito is an obvious thought. 2) distinction, is not confused with other pensamientos.Descartes had no case to reach the reality of the outside world xq since xq cogito can not be displayed by the senses. Then there is the existence of an external world created by God, so is q q prove its existence. THROUGH makes ideas: 1) Adventicias.las arriving from outside, are strange. 2) x facticias.las formed self. 3) Innate, with whom we nacido.dentro of these ideas tnmos
the idea of infinity. may come from innate xqno xq experience is limited. To have the idea of the infinite must be infinite or infinite someone (God) has placed in me. As a god exists, what in the world is good and perfect exterior.Dios x so we are not fools and senses if they can. 3sustacias. 1st sustancia.Dios substance 2nd res cogito (thinking substance) 3rd substance res extensa
4DESCARTES
Cn We can compare Plato, with which it resembles in its dualistic conception of reality, though Plato distinguishes a sensible world which is intelligible copy of another, which is transcendent and the actual reality. Thinking and bodily substances of Descartes are independent of each other. In addition, the subject is not a transcendent reality. Both also agree on rejecting the senses, although in one case is because we are the sensible world, changing, and another because sometimes deceive us. The reason is the only power capable of knowing the truth, for Plato because he knows the world of ideas, eternal or immutable, and discards it complies with evident truths, obvious.
Differs radically from Aristotle’s theory of knowledge, for this view that starts with sensory information on which to apply the understanding. The same may hold true for St. Thomas, with which it differs also in demonstrating the existence of God, which Aquinas made part of the world, while discarding is based on the idea of infinity.