intellectual history review. niccolo machiavelli (1469-1527)
TRANSCRIPT
Intellectual History Review
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
• "Que sais-je?" (What do I know?)– Nothing
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
Heliocentric
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
Elliptical Orbits
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
From Science to Philosophy
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
René Descartes (1596-1650)
Baconian Thought
• The Advancement of Learning (1605)
• Novum Organum (1620)
• Anti-scholasticism– Empiricism– Inductive reasoning
• Start with a question, end with a certainty
Cartesian Thought
• Discourse on Method (1637)
• Systematic doubt– “Cogito ergo sum”
• Deductive reasoning
• Rationalism
Modern Application
Baconian empiricism and induction
+ Cartesian rationalism and deduction
= The modern scientific method
The Philosophes
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
John Locke (1632-1704)
Voltaire (1694-1778)
• Toleration• Critical of organized
religion– “Ecracsez l’infame”– Believed in Deism
• “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794)
On Crimes and Punishments (1764)
The Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
• The Social Contract (1762)
The Physiocrats
• Francois Quesnay (1694-1774)
• Pierre Dupont de Nemours (1739-1817)
• Anti-mercantilism
• Anti-regulation
• Concerned with agriculture
• Government’s role: protect property and enforce laws
Radical Philosophes
• Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789)
• David Hume (1711-1776)
19th Century Intellectual Developments
August Comte (1798-1857)
• Positivism1. The Will of God2. The Will of Nature 3. The rule of unchanging law
(positive age)• There are rules for social
behavior that man can understand
• The social sciences– Sociology
Darwin and Evolution
• Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875)– Geological change was
slow, not due to catastrophes
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)
• All forms of life rose through continual adjustment
• His ideas were flawed—he believed children inherited characteristics of their parents
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
The Voyage of the HMS Beagle1831-1836
Galapagos Islands
The Origin of the Species (1859)
Archbishop Wilberforce
T.H. Huxley “Darwin’s Bulldog”
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and Social Darwinism
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
• “God is Dead”• Superman
(Übermensch)• The “Will to Power”
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
• The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
• Sexual Drives• Childhood Experiences• The Unconscious• Id, Ego, and Superego• Repression
– Oedipus Complex– Defense Mechanisms
• Psychoanalysis
• Stages – Oral– Anal– Phallic – Latent
The “New Science”
• Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907)
Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
• Explored electromagnetism – Led to the development of the generator, the
telegraph, the electric motor, streetcars, and the electric light
Other Scientific Advancements
• Max Planck (1858-1947)– Quantum mechanics
• Niels Bohr (1885-1962)– Atomic structure
• Antoine Henri Becquerel and Pierre and Marie Curie– Radioactivity
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
• Background• Atheist existentialism• “Bad Faith”
Main themes of existentialism
1. Existence precedes essence – man is a conscious being, not a thing that is
manipulated or predetermined
2. Anxiety / Anguish
• The dread of the nothingness of human existence
3. Absurdity
• I am my own existence, but my existence is absurd
4. The Void
• There is nothing at all that structures the world in which we live
5. Death
• Death is the most personal and authentic moment…but it is as absurd as birth
6. Alienation
• Apart from our own conscious being, all else is “otherness,” and we are alienated from that otherness