Hellenistic Period, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine & Modernity
The Hellenistic Period
The Hellenistic period is conventionally defined as the period between the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) and the Roman conquest of Greece in the final days of the republic. Alexander the Great attempted to create an empire, but with his untimely death, not only did the empire disappear, but also the Athens of democracy, philosophy, and art. Following the general decline in Athens, cities like Alexandria, Pergamum, and Antioch emerged in the periphery. A new reality and a different mentality arose. The citizen, without police or a security framework, felt orphaned, disconnected, and unsure. The wise man would seek salvation in Hellenistic individuality. Philosophy became a moral science, understood not as the pursuit of virtue for education, but as a path to happiness. Thus, it would abandon worldviews as well as logical and metaphysical concerns and begin a new focus on ethical behavior and happiness in the private or individual sphere. Wisdom became a way of life that sought as its highest ideal the perfection of the sage. In pursuit of this ideal, three main philosophical currents emerged: Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism.
Epicureanism
Epicurus (341 BC-270 BC) made ataraxia, or wisdom in the nonchalance of spirit, the goal: pleasure is the beginning and end of a truly happy life. However, as some immediate pleasures eventually bring pain, the human spirit should weigh the ends to achieve ataraxia, tranquility, or nonchalance of the soul that will ensure true freedom. In this sense, Epicureanism also advises detachment from public affairs, as they are a continuous source of emotional and mental disturbances.
Stoicism
For Stoicism, founded around 262 BC by Zeno of Citium, nature is governed by a reasonable principle that ultimately aligns with divinity. Therefore, according to the Stoics, the sage will agree and adhere to the will of God that governs all things, reaching the famous apathy. Stoic ideas permeated intellectuals and politicians, achieving significant influence in Rome and even Christianity.
Skepticism
Skepticism (Pyrrho, Timon, Arcesilaus, Carneades, Sextus Empiricus) opted for wisdom understood as abstaining from all judgments (afaxia) and a kind of indifference to all reality and certainty that achieves peace of mind and, consequently, happiness.
Introduction to the Thought of Plato and His Conception of Ethics
Plato’s Theory of Ideas or Forms
Plato is known in the philosophical world for his theory of ideas or forms. His philosophy is a commitment to understanding the whole of reality, covering absolutely all the problems of philosophy and attempting to provide answers. A faithful disciple of Socrates, Plato uses his maieutic method as a necessary instrument of any philosophical reflection. Thus, in his writings, he gave rise to a new literary genre, the dialogue, which recreates Socratic maieutics. But dialogue is much more than a literary device; it is the way, the only way of doing philosophy, to advance in the understanding of truth. However, we must not forget that the most important part of Plato’s thought lies in his unwritten doctrines, of which we have many allusions in Plato’s dialogues themselves and through the “notes” we have received from his students and other indirect witnesses, such as Aristotle, for example.
Plato’s Conception of Reality and Knowledge
Plato starts from a clear idea: reality is not chaos but an order (cosmos). This order is fully manifested in the cosmos, so he ventures into the sensitive cosmos (which, to be ordered and real, must be a copy of the intelligible world) and the ethical-political cosmos (founded by man from his messy situation in the world of sense as a means to return to the intelligible cosmos from which he came). Plato tries to solve the problem of the principle (arkhe) of the physis by saying that this (the material world) is a copy (participation) of the real world, unchanging and full of reality, which is the intelligible world (cosmos noetós). Thus, we find that this world is full of intelligible forms or ideas (synonymous terms). These are genuine realities, moreover, the fundamental realities that make things in the sensible world what they are. However, the overriding principle is the Good or the One: this is the ultimate basis of reality and everything that participates in it.
Each level of reality corresponds to a degree of intelligibility. For Plato, the epistemological problem is dependent on the ontological problem. The sensible world, due to its changing nature, carries an unsafe and therefore unreliable knowledge. This is opinion (doxa). But within doxa, there are two degrees: imagination (eikasía) and “reliable” sensitive knowledge called belief (pistis). The intelligible world, due to its immutable nature, carries a certain and therefore safe knowledge: science (episteme). Within episteme, there are also two degrees: dianoia (mathematical knowledge, which is related in some way to visual-geometric assumptions) and noesis (full intellectual vision that corresponds to the knowledge of ideas, ideas of numbers, and first principles, and, within them, in a special way, the supreme principle: the Good or the One).
Plato’s Anthropology and Ethics
Man is misplaced: he is located in the sensible world when his nature is intelligible. Platonic dualism conceives man as an accidental union of soul and body. He is primarily soul, intelligible (and akin to ideas, similar but not identical), and immortal, circumstantially linked to a body that is a prison, a shell, a tomb, which binds him to the sensible world and prevents him from flying to the intelligible world from which he came. Plato said that “knowing is remembering” what the soul has seen in previous incarnations; he embraces the Orphic theory of metempsychosis or transmigration of souls. Thus, man can return to the world of ideas if he devotes himself to understanding the ideas (philosophy); if not, he must go through a series of reincarnations until he can ascend to intelligible truth. Consequently, man must remember (anamnesis) in his sensitive prison and climb the path of truth. He proposes three paths to truth, which are not exclusive but complementary: dialectic (the logical or intellectual path), the erotic impulse (the alogical but not irrational path), and catharsis (or purification, which is the moral path).
For Plato, as for any Athenian of his time, the moral subject is a political subject. That is, being a man is being a citizen (politai) because human life is inseparable from the polis (city) and its laws. In this sense, three desires are distinguished in the soul of man: the concupiscible (desire for pleasure), the rational appetite (desire for truth and mastery of pleasures), and a third appetite that is not an appetite because it is passionate and is not a desire because it often opposes them (the irascible). According to our philosopher, each individual desire in man must function properly guided by its virtue: temperance for the concupiscible, fortitude for the irascible, and prudence (fronesis) for the rational. In addition, they must all relate harmoniously so that the rational appetite controls the other two. The regulatory basis that would be responsible for the proper functioning of all would be justice. Well, this same distinction and balance must also be given in the polis. Thus, in the Platonic state, we find the class of men who are concerned with meeting the material needs of citizens. These are the farmers, artisans, and merchants. They are men dominated by the concupiscible and, therefore, are still far from ascending the path of truth, although they may get a little closer to it if they do their job well in the city. Also required are those dedicated to the care and defense of the city, the guardians, men dominated by the irascible part of the soul. Finally, it is necessary that the city has men who are guided by knowledge and who know it for an end: the knowledge of the intelligible world that surrounds him. These will be those in whom the rational appetite predominates—the rulers (philosophers).
Introduction to the Thought of Aristotle and His Conception of Ethics
Aristotle’s Philosophical Realism
With Aristotle, Greek philosophy culminates, laying the foundations of philosophical realism. For Aristotle, science is knowledge of the cause of a thing, and philosophy is the science of first causes and principles. He picks up Plato’s idea of philosophy as knowledge of the essences of things, what is immutable, universal, and eternal, but, unlike his teacher, he believes that essences cannot be separated from things but must be in the things themselves. Thus, Aristotle lowers the transcendent essence of Plato and makes it immanent as a principle of singular entities.
Aristotle’s Epistemology
Against Plato, Aristotle laid the foundations of epistemological realism by revaluing sensory experience as the starting point of knowledge and science, combining it with a firm belief in the universalizing power of reason. Aristotle arrives at concepts, ideas, or “universals” through observation of the real world and the abstract functions of the human mind. Therefore, in the epistemological aspect, Aristotle rejects both Plato’s idealism and empiricism. For Aristotle, intellectual knowledge is essentially superior to the sensitive, but not due to the intuition of Platonic intelligible ideas, but is realized through intellectual abstraction from sensory experience, which is not only the temporal but also the intellectual foundation of knowledge. Science is only of the universal and necessary, but universals are not outside of individual things but in them and for them, but not in the abstract form that our intellect conceives. The abstract universal is the work of intelligence, but it is based on the common essence of things that possess the same species. The work of intelligence is to abstract the unique object that we have through the senses, noting its individual qualities to reach the common element that is the essence or nature of each entity. This is the epistemological foundation of philosophical realism.
According to Aristotle, there are different kinds of knowledge because there are different ways of knowing. There is a purely sensory knowledge that, when organized by memory (an internal sense that recognizes what has been previously apprehended or perceived), is what Aristotle called “experience.” Experience is common to man and animals. But man also has other modes of knowledge: technical, prudence, science, intelligence, and wisdom. On the other hand, he divides science into speculative, practical, and poietic. The end of speculative science is truth, that of practical science is action, and that of poietic science is production. Science, in the full sense, is speculative science and is divided into physics, mathematics, and metaphysics.
Aristotle’s Logic, Physics, and Metaphysics
For Aristotle, logic provides the modus operandi of human thought in scientific activity. In this sense, he conceived “logic” as a propaedeutic discipline or preparation for the better development of other sciences. He established the first systematic logical doctrine, and for centuries, his writings dominated scholastic logic. Aristotelian physics starts from a series of basic assumptions adopted in the previous philosophical tradition. We must also bear in mind that by physics, Aristotle meant both an empirical science (natural sciences such as biology, chemistry, etc.) and what is properly called natural philosophy. In summary, physical science conceives its object as beings whose nature is not immutable but, on the contrary, involves the possession of an intrinsic and immanent principle of movement.
He distinguishes two types of change or movement: substantial and accidental. From the experience of substantial change, he infers the distinction between prime matter and substantial form (which is what is known as hylomorphism or hylomorphic doctrine), while the analysis of the experience of accidental change will lead him to distinguish between substance and its accidents. The application of the concepts of potency and act allows him to solve the problem of the nature of movement or becoming. His further deepening of the principles and laws of motion are expressed in his doctrine of causation.
Aristotle conceives of metaphysics (which he called “first philosophy”) as the highest of the speculative sciences. In Aristotelian texts, there are various characterizations or definitions of this science. Thus, metaphysics appears as the science that seeks the first causes and the highest principles of reality, as the “science of being as being,” of substance, or as the science that deals with God and supersensible substance. These four different objects that Aristotle assigns to his metaphysics have led to many problems and many interpretations. However, unity can be seen in their complementarity.
Faced with the univocal concept of being posited by Parmenides, Aristotle introduces the notion of being as “analogous.” The term “being” is commonly said of all things, not in the same way (univocity) but not in completely different ways (equivocity) either, but in a certain direction or position between the univocal and the equivocal, which is “something in common” and that is what constitutes the “analogy.” Specifically, Aristotle identifies ten ways of being, which he calls “categories” or “predicaments.” These ten supreme genera or modes of classifying reality are substance and the nine accidents (quantity, quality, relation, action, passion, time, place, habit or possession, situation or condition). Another fundamental way of being for Aristotle is being in act and being in potency, which can affect any of the categories or predicaments. His doctrine of causation and hylomorphism, although they are also issues addressed in physical treatises, are pillars on which he bases his metaphysics.
Aristotle’s metaphysical science culminates in theology, which deals with the being that exists per se, that is, the being in its fullest sense, the pure form without matter. If in the Physics Aristotle concludes that there is an unmoved and eternal prime mover from the fact of motion, in the Metaphysics he demonstrates from substance and potency that Pure Act is required as a foundation, which he called God.
Aristotle’s Anthropology and Ethics
Regarding his anthropological conception, Aristotle abandons Platonic dualism and believes that the human soul is the first act of the organic physical body; it is its substantial form that, together with the material body, constitutes man. Aristotle did not consider the soul as something foreign to the body but as its vital principle, substantially united to it and forming the natural human compound. He rejected Plato’s theory of metempsychosis or transmigration of souls and his thesis about the accidental union between body and soul, but he accepted Plato’s spiritual consideration. Rational activity is essential to the soul, and it is essentially independent of the body. Man has a rational soul that, without the need to multiply forms, exercises the functions of vegetative life and sensitive life and also enjoys understanding or reason and free will. Thus, Aristotle affirms the spirituality of the soul, but his thought is obscure and ambiguous regarding immortality. Aristotle’s psychological contributions have survived for centuries, constituting the common heritage of Western thought about man and the soul.
Aristotle’s ethics, like the rest of his philosophy, is teleological, that is, it refers to an end or purpose. All natural activity tends towards an end; it is the end that moves the agent to act. In this sense, Aristotle’s ethics has a purpose that is summarized in the pursuit of happiness. The supreme good and ultimate goal of all activity is happiness. And happiness is achieved through the activity that is natural and proper to each being. Since the most natural and proper activity of man, the one that best corresponds to his nature, is intellectual activity, then the most perfect form of happiness will be contemplative activity. Thus, an intellectualist and mentalist morality began, in which the passions were subordinated to contemplation as the most noble activity of man. Moreover, it is a theocentric morality in the sense that God is the ultimate object of contemplation and, therefore, of human happiness.
In summary, happiness is a virtuous life according to reason or, what is the same, the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. He distinguishes between dianoetic or intellectual virtues (corresponding to the rational part of the soul and concerning the exercise of intelligence) and ethical or moral virtues (which relate to sensitivity and affection and consist in the mastery of tendencies and irrational impulses proper to the sensitive soul). Aristotle characterized ethical virtues as a state (habit or disposition) that mediates choice, which is essentially the imposition of a mean on us determined by a rule, as a prudent man would determine.
Aristotle’s Political Philosophy
Aristotle’s political philosophy is presented as a synthesis of theory and practice, as an attempt to bring truth and life together within the framework of a realistic approach. A fundamental thesis of Aristotelian thought is the consideration of man as a political or social animal by nature. Man is a deficient animal and needs society to live. Thus, the human community does not exist by convention but is a requirement of human nature, since men cannot be realized as such except through society. It is in society that man can achieve perfection and happiness. He supports three natural forms of society: family, village, and state.
Aristotle’s Legacy
Aristotle, along with Plato, has dominated the entire development of the history of Western philosophy from antiquity to the modern age. He is the first to achieve the configuration of philosophy as a science within a global system of human knowledge. At the top of this knowledge lies philosophy in its specific meaning, metaphysics, pointing out the limits of the other sciences and their connections. Arguably, the influence of Aristotelian doctrine has had a unique historical significance, since few philosophers in history have exerted such a strong influence. A quick review of the history of Western thought is enough to realize the importance of Aristotelian philosophy, which is not due to mere historical circumstances or the encyclopedic nature of his work but to the richness and depth of its contents. A great researcher and teacher, Aristotle systematized all the knowledge of his time and established logical, theoretical, and political frameworks of knowledge that still remain.
Anthropological Concept of Augustine of Hippo
Augustine’s Focus on the Soul
One of the main characteristics of St. Augustine is his interest in the soul, “God and the soul I want to know. Is that all? Nothing more” (Solil. I, 2.7). The way he treats the subject of the soul, his introspection, his art in describing and distinguishing the feelings of the soul, and his experiential insight into the inner world reveal in Augustine a spirit of extraordinary psychological feats.
Augustine’s Understanding of Man
For Augustine, as for the earlier Fathers, man is a unity. But man is not a new substance resulting from the fusion of two substances, as medieval scholasticism would later identify, using Aristotle’s terminology. In St. Augustine, unity is more about the soul possessing the body, using it, and governing it. Therefore, strictly speaking, man is the soul; the body is not an essential constituent of equal rank. In psychology, this is Augustinian Platonism, common to the Fathers in general. However, the pessimistic touch that was already observed in Origen, that the soul lives in the body as in a prison, is rejected by St. Augustine. However, this view of man as essentially a soul is a concept that is maintained and remains firm in St. Augustine and became the common heritage of Christians in their position compared to men in general.
Man is, according to the Doctor of Hippo, a soul that serves as a body. Man is conceived in two ways: a) as a complete and perfect substance, subject to the allocation of immanent and transitive operations, and b) as a philosophical problem (faced with the duality of his drives). The latter question appeared heavily influenced by Platonism and Neoplatonism and fails to reconcile human unity with the duality of human beings due to their co-principles (soul and body). For St. Augustine, the soul is a complete rational substance, endowed with all the virtues necessary to govern the body, which is aimed at union with God.
The Soul’s Nature and Faculties
The soul is immaterial and immortal. Made in the image of God, it is a reflection of the Trinity in its three faculties: memory, intellect, and will. Everything that is not God participates in Him. God is the model of all creatures: the world of ideas lies in his mind forever eternal and consubstantial; the soul is an image of the Trinity insofar as it knows and loves. Man, knowing himself as the image of God, comes to the knowledge of that God. Man wants to be happy, and the natural place of the human heart is God. He tends towards all that is worthy and noble love. Happiness can only consist in the possession of God through love.
Challenges in Augustine’s Anthropology
The absence of hylomorphism in Augustinian cosmology leaves the problem of the unity of man in a solution that, although certain, is indecisive and hesitant in its conceptual tools. The comparison between the unity of corporeal and spiritual man with the unity of Christ, human and divine, leaves the problem in a perspective that lacks the understanding of a unified ontological structure. The ontological problem is related to the inadequacy of his explanation of the relationship between human consciousness and the experience of the mind itself.
St. Augustine understood well the importance of the issue of seminal reasons and the metaphysical problems that it gave rise to when faced with the question of the origin of the soul. Holding the transmission of original sin by generation, because it affects all human nature, he hesitated about the possibility that the soul was transmitted by parents to their children (some form of “traducianism”). If so, the soul would have to come from that area in which the entire human race had originated. Hence, the soul—as St. Augustine would say—would be material in some sense, although its specific materiality would be quite different from other materials and therefore could be considered “spiritual.” However, it cannot be argued with certainty that St. Augustine defended traducianism, nor has he fully opted for the creation of the soul.
Thus, the problem of the origin of the soul will always present difficulties for Augustine. For him, it was obvious to all that the soul cannot emanate from God in the sense of neo-Platonic pantheism, since that would imply that the soul would have to be somehow part of God. He also corrected Origen, who wanted to adapt the Platonic doctrine of pre-existence to Christian thought. At times, Augustine leaned towards explaining the origin of the human spiritual soul by traducianism, which attributed it to naturally occurring forces. This opinion is based solely on theological grounds and tends to explain the transmission of original sin by inheritance.
His terminology and doctrine on the spirituality of the soul are indeed in open opposition to the apparent materialism referred to by Tertullian and, finally, attribute the spirituality and immortality of the soul to the immediate action of creative omnipotence. The truth is that in one of his last works, Retractions, Augustine himself acknowledges that he had not reached full light on this issue.
Thomas Aquinas
Man, Body, and Soul
The Thomistic doctrine about man differs from the Augustinian and is based on Aristotle’s conception, which he seeks to reconcile with basic beliefs of Christianity, such as the immortality of the soul and creation. In line with hylomorphism, he says that man is composed of matter and form. The union between soul and body is not accidental but substantial. Man is a substance composed of soul and body, with the soul informing the body. The body is the principle of individuation; the soul gives man his capacity as such. Contrary to the assertion of some of his predecessors that various substantial forms exist in man, such as the vegetative and the sensitive, Thomas affirms the unity of man through hylomorphism: the human being is a unity in which there is only one substantial form, the rational soul, which directly and immediately informs the prime matter, constituting the composite “man.” The vegetative and sensitive soul disappear, but not the rational soul, which has being in itself. Each human soul is created individually by God. The subsistence and immateriality of the soul are the essential characteristics of the soul, from which he proves its immortality. Moreover, it should also be noted that Aquinas considers man as a person: he adopts Boethius’ definition of person as “individual substance of a rational nature,” which he conceives as “that which subsists in the rational nature.”
Modern and Postmodern Man
Anthropological Conception of Modernity
What is Modernity?
Modern philosophy is a new way of doing philosophy, different from that used in ancient and medieval philosophy. There are many factors that influence this change, and we cannot stop to analyze them in detail, but perhaps two should be emphasized, one philosophical and the other historical. Philosophically speaking, we must emphasize the decline of medieval scholastic thought. The richness of this thought began to be truncated due to the criticism made of its central points by the figure of William of Ockham and also by the gradual emergence of second-rate thinkers who, in their excessive zeal to defend the scholastic system, came to make an apology that became ridiculous and counterproductive. On a historical level, we note that the situation of modernity is a crisis situation in which the Great War, the “Hundred Years’ War,” takes place. This creates such uneasiness at the European level that the religious foundations of Europe and its metaphysical foundations began to be questioned. Therefore, we could say that the characteristics presented by modern philosophy, broadly speaking, are:
- Shifting the theological question to more central issues of man and nature.
- Emphasis on the human subject as the starting point of knowledge. Principle of immanence.
- Primacy of the problem of knowledge over the problem of being. The first problem raised by the philosophers of modernity will be the scope or limits of our faculties of knowledge.
- Replacing the concept of truth with certainty.
The word “Modernity” has a specific ideological and philosophical connotation; it means an attitude of mind that, although it becomes dominant in the modern age, is not limited only to a period of history. We cannot identify the term modernity with that of modern times. The latter means a period of history that runs from the end of the Middle Ages until the French Revolution. For its part, modernity, far from being over, lingers in the psychological structure of man in the new century. Characteristics of Modernity:
- Secularization.
- Scientific and technical mentality. Myth of progress. Scientism and technicality.
- Philosophical option for immanence.
- Immanentist utopianism: Marxism, bourgeois capitalist spirit.
The “Cogito” and Cartesian Dualism
The French philosopher and scientist Descartes has been called the “Father of Modern Philosophy.” The clear definition of his purpose and the scope of his project are characteristic of Cartesian thought. In short, the Cartesian project advocates the unity of all sciences, which depend on a single method obtained from the model offered by mathematics. Descartes establishes reason as the main source of knowledge and the secure criterion of truth. Based on these rationalist principles, in turn, his method will be, at the same time, the starting point and goal of his philosophy. In this sense, Descartes makes the mathematical method the method of all reality: replacing the complexity of the real with clear and distinct ideas. Ideas are the models to which reality must conform or be reality itself. In this way, thought is the condition of being, and the “cogito” is the principle or starting point from which all reality is to be deduced. Descartes conceived the method as a safe path that will lead to perfect knowledge, providing certainty and evidence, since “all knowledge is certain and evident knowledge.” Thus, the method is defined as a set of certain and simple rules (evidence, analysis, synthesis, and enumeration) that prevent ever taking the false for the real or making an error. Methodical doubt is a requirement of the Cartesian method as the first rule because the first thing that is required for a proposition to be true and certain is that it be entirely certain. His mathematical talent and rationalistic spirit led him to the idea of deducing his entire system from a few clear and obvious truths. He takes doubt as a tool to doubt everything, and in the process, he encounters an indubitable truth that will become the first principle of philosophy, “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”).
Descartes reaches a first certainty, the cogito, which represents the consciousness of the thinking subject itself: the first truth presented intuitively to the spirit when it questions itself. That is the certainty that he firmly believed in and on which he will build the edifice of his philosophy: he has discovered the first truth and, at the same time, the criterion of evidence of all truth. Descartes does not admit as true anything that is not as obvious as it is to him. So he wants to avoid precipitation and prevention, not admitting anything in his judgment other than what is presented clearly and distinctly, in the way that “cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) is presented. In this sense, Descartes accepted the existence of other innate ideas, which are also clear and distinct. These are: the I that thinks (the soul), the infinite and perfect being (God), and external reality (the world). For Descartes, there are as many substances as there are clear and distinct ideas that his mind can conceive. Thus, substance is the immediate subject of any attribute of which we have a real idea. There are, therefore, three substances: God or the infinite and necessary substance (res infinita), the thinking substance (res cogitans), and the extended substance (res extensa). Now, what we perceive is not the substance as such but the attributes of substances. An attribute is that by which a substance is distinguished from another and is thought in itself. Attributes depend on the substance and are immutable. The essential attribute is the nature of a substance. Each substance has an essential attribute: thought (res cogitans), perfection (God), extension (res extensa). Essential attributes identify the substance. Cartesian thought is included in the mechanistic context: admitting only quantity, number, and local motion. It excludes any forces other than mechanical, that is, the production of motion and order is denied. Descartes applies mechanism to the life of plants and animals, which he considers mere automata without consciousness. This is led by his strict separation between the res cogitans and the res extensa. Therefore, in the case of man, there is no substantial union because the attributes of the two substances contained in him are different from each other. Man is a substance composed of two incomplete substances, but entirely complete. Ultimately, it is the case of two separate substances. The body is a machine attached to the spirit, or, if you prefer, the relationship of the mind to the body is similar to that which exists between the pilot and the ship. Descartes attempts to explain the mutual interaction between both substances through “vital and animal spirits” circulating in the blood. These transmit to the pineal gland, which houses the soul, the messages taken from the body, in the same way that they also transmit the mandates of the soul to the different organs of the body. This Cartesian dualism would be one of the major points of contention between his critics and supporters. Descartes claimed that the application of his method, the proposed unification of the sciences, and the construction of a universal science would culminate in the development of a rationally founded moral science. However, he only had time to formulate a provisional morality.
Descartes was not only an innovator in philosophy but also the first to apply mathematics to the physical sciences and the initiator of the modern mechanistic conception of nature. Reactions to Descartes’ doctrines were felt immediately. Already during his life, several objections were made to the basic points of his doctrine (Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi, etc.). But both materialists and idealists have found support for their ideas in Descartes. Both groups have seen him as the first modern philosopher, the instigator of rational subjectivity, conceiving man as reason. In fact, his ideas dominated the world for two centuries after his death. Modern thought takes Descartes as its starting point.
Postmodernity
We cannot conclude this brief introduction without referring to postmodern thought. This thought tries to capture the situation in which many of our contemporaries find themselves, or at least what is in the environment, and establish from here a series of statements. Postmodernists insist that the man of modernity, one of whose last representatives would be Habermas, has died, and a new type of enlightened man, who no longer fights for any value because the grand narratives are no longer useful, has also died. This man is not a pessimist but a happy hedonist who is sorry to have to assume this new living situation and, of course, within the limits imposed by tolerance. The main representatives of this trend are Lyotard, Vattimo, and Braudillard, among others. Postmodern characteristics: weak reasoning; decline of duty; nihilism (hedonism, activism, avoidance).