why is modern philosophy important essay

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• Introduction

The empiricism of Francis Bacon

The materialism of thomas hobbes, the rationalism of descartes, the rationalism of spinoza and leibniz, reason in locke and berkeley, basic science of human nature in hume, materialism and scientific discovery, social and political philosophy, critical examination of reason in kant.

• The idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel
• Positivism and social theory in Comte, Mill, and Marx
• Independent and irrationalist movements

• What is ethics?
• How is ethics different from morality?
• Why does ethics matter?
• Is ethics a social science?

modern philosophy

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• Table Of Contents

modern philosophy , in the history of Western philosophy , the philosophical speculation that occurred primarily in western Europe and North America from the 17th through the 19th century. The modern period is marked by the emergence of the broad schools of empiricism and rationalism and the epochal transformation of Western metaphysics , epistemology , and ethics by the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the greatest figure of the modern period.

The rise of empiricism and rationalism

Empiricism is the view that all concepts originate in experience, that all concepts are about or applicable to things that can be experienced, or that all rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable only through experience. Rationalism, by contrast, is the doctrine that regards reason or the intellect as the primary or fundamental source and test of knowledge. Holding that reality itself has an inherently logical structure, rationalists assert the existence of a class of truths beyond the reach of sense perception and graspable directly by reason or the intellect. The rivalry between empiricism and rationalism dominated the philosophical controversies of the 17th and 18th centuries and was hardly resolved before the appearance of Immanuel Kant.

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 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.

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 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:

• To employ the procedure of complete and systematic doubt to eliminate every belief that does not pass the test of indubitability ( skepticism ).
• To accept no idea as certain that is not clear, distinct, and free of contradiction (mathematicism).
• 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 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.

The Enlightenment

Although they both lived and worked in the late 17th century, Isaac Newton and John Locke (1632–1704) were the true fathers of the Enlightenment . Newton was the last of the scientific geniuses of the age, and his great Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687; Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy ) was the culmination of the movement that had begun with Copernicus and Galileo—the first scientific synthesis based on the application of mathematics to nature in every detail. The basic idea of the authority and autonomy of reason, which dominated all philosophizing in the 18th century, was, at bottom, the consequence of Newton’s work.

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes—scientists and methodologists of science—performed like people urgently attempting to persuade nature to reveal its secrets. Newton’s comprehensive mechanistic system made it seem as if at last nature had done so. It is impossible to exaggerate the enormous enthusiasm that this assumption kindled in all of the major thinkers of the late 17th and 18th centuries, from Locke to Kant. The new enthusiasm for reason that they all instinctively shared was based not upon the mere advocacy of philosophers such as Descartes and Leibniz but upon their conviction that, in the spectacular achievement of Newton, reason had succeeded in conquering the natural world.

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.

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:

• To discover the origin of human ideas.
• To determine their certainty and evidential value.
• 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:

• That the ultimate source of human ideas is sense experience.
• 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.

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.

The profound influence of Locke spread to France , where it not only resulted in the skeptical empiricism of Voltaire (1694–1778) but also united with mechanistic aspects of Cartesianism to produce an entire school of sensationalistic materialism. Representative works included Man a Machine (1747) by Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (1709–51), Treatise on the Sensations (1754) by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–80), and The System of Nature (1770) by Paul-Henri Dietrich, baron d’Holbach (1723–89). This position even found its way into many of the articles of the great French Encyclopédie , edited by Denis Diderot (1713–84) and Jean d’Alembert (1717–83), which was almost a complete compendium of the scientific and humanistic accomplishments of the 18th century.

Although the terms Middle Ages and Renaissance were not invented until well after the historical periods they designate , scholars of the 18th century called their age “the Enlightenment” with self-conscious enthusiasm and pride. It was an age of optimism and expectations of new beginnings. Great strides were made in chemistry and biological science. Jean-Baptiste de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829), Georges, Baron Cuvier (1769–1832), and Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707–88), introduced a new system of animal classification. In the eight years between 1766 and 1774, three chemical elements—hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen—were discovered. Foundations were being laid in psychology and the social sciences and in ethics and aesthetics . The work of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, baron de L’Aulne (1727–81), and Montesquieu (1689–1755) in France, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) in Italy, and Adam Smith (1723–90) in Scotland marked the beginning of economics, politics, history, sociology, and jurisprudence as sciences. Hume, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), and the British “moral sense” theorists were turning ethics into a specialized field of philosophical inquiry. And Anthony Ashley, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), Edmund Burke (1729–97), Johann Gottsched (1700–66), and Alexander Baumgarten (1714–62) were laying the foundations for a systematic aesthetics .

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.

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).

The Importance of Modern Philosophy

What is modern philosophy? What are the benefits of reading about it? What are the main contributions of philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and Locke? What can it teach us about our own lives? How does it relate to our values? What are the challenges and possibilities of our modern world? The answers to these questions are all interconnected. Modern philosophy can help us see the common ground between different world views and foster ecumenical discourse.

René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and lay Catholic who paved the way for modern philosophy. He was a mathematician and inventor and invented the analytic geometry that unified algebra and geometry. His work had a lasting impact on philosophy and science, and it has continued to influence the way we understand the world today. Learn about the philosopher’s legacy in this article.

Philosophers have long tended to view man as an immaterial fragment of the universe, and in Descartes’ time, he broke this connection. His work established the metaphysical foundation of this dualistic view, which states that the soul exists separately from the body. The soul is an immaterial, immortal being, and is therefore separate from the rest of the physical universe. This idea was revolutionary in the 18th century, and it has influenced many philosophers and scientists ever since.

The central chapter of Leibniz and modern philosophy concerns the tension between the nature of things and the mind, which is essential to cognition. Leibniz seeks to reconcile the nature of things and the mind, and to do so he develops a concept called the conatus. Hence, Leibniz’s project is to create a new system of knowledge. This system of knowledge is the foundation of modern philosophy.

Although Leibniz developed a rigorous system of logic based on a mechanical natural philosophy, it also strove to create a metaphysical foundation for the natural. His doctrine of dispositional ideas can only be understood against this background. His lifelong struggle with the doctrine of absolute power was not confined to his philosophical works. The emergence of modern science and philosophy has made the role of mathematics and logic more important than ever.

David Hume was a British philosopher who studied the same subjects as Descartes and Mersenne a century earlier. He also read continental authors such as Malebranche, Dubos, and Bayle, and occasionally baited Jesuits with iconoclastic arguments. Hume’s later works, like his Four Dissertations, are considered the foundations of modern philosophy. But what exactly is Hume’s contribution to modern philosophy ?

David Hume introduces the concept of belief in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. For example, when we see a glass falling, we believe that the glass will break, not that we expect it to. When we see wet ground, we think of rain. Hume investigates the nature of belief and the way we associate ideas with past events. He argues that we associate ideas with the past without realizing it, and that this process of associating ideas with the past is the basis for all of our beliefs.

Whether we agree or disagree with Locke’s view of the mind is a question that we must answer. Locke defines an idea as the object of a man’s understanding. This notion can be any kind of mental object. Locke also explores the role of relations in thinking. Whether we think of things as things or as relations, they all involve the role of relational thinking. Locke argues that a man’s ideas are formed by relations between objects and people.

The essay is divided into three parts, Book I, Book II, and Book III. Book II focuses on the nature of nature and how human beings are related to it. Book III explores the proper role of language and its misuse. A majority of Book III is devoted to combating the misuse of language. Locke argues that improper use of language blocks knowledge and offers recommendations to avoid this problem. Throughout his Essay, Locke makes the distinction between natural rights and the rights of property.

Postanalytic philosophy

In the past, philosophers have appealed to the idea of non-existent objects to prove their claims about reality. Such claims have, however, been rejected by the linguistic turn, which sought a different account of necessity and a priori. This new account incorporated the idea of possible worlds. However, it is not clear what this new approach means in terms of defining the nature of reality.

The term “analytic philosophy” has its origins in the papers of Charles Moore. Moore understood “analysis” as rephrasing ordinary common sense propositions to provide more insight into the meaning. This was one of the goals of Moore’s paper, Proof of the External World. This approach is often associated with linguistic philosophy, but it has also influenced postmodern philosophy . The following list is a brief discussion of the most important works in the field.

Church-Turing thesis

While a number of arguments exist for the validity of Church-Turing’s thesis, its most notable flaw is its failure to account for the negative aspects of the theory. The Church-Turing thesis suggests that certain problems cannot be solved through computation or human thought. While it is true that certain answers exist, no one has been able to find them. It’s therefore impossible for a machine to answer all questions, as it can’t be a human being.

The Church-Turing thesis proposes that human thought is equivalent to “calculable by LCM.” While this is an alternative definition, Church’s thesis was not accepted until the 1940s. This is because Church and Turing were talking about effective methods, not finitely realizable physical systems. Regardless of the difference between the two these theses are not in agreement, and it’s possible that Church’s thesis is more compelling.

Hume’s critique of Locke

One of the central problems in Locke’s critique of Hume is his insistence that morality is not based on empirical facts. Hume believes that morality is based on our feelings and sentiments. Therefore, he is unable to accept the claim that morality is based on empirical facts. This is in direct opposition to Locke’s views, which claim that morality is based on a single, ultimate principle.

In the mid-seventeenth century, Hume entered the British Moralists debate, which lasted until the eighteenth century. Hume makes clear that reason does not oppose a passion, but only opposes another motive. Thus, the idea of a rationally perfect person is false. This means that reason is a slave to its passions and cannot protect our interests.

Kant’s critique of Leibniz

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that we can only know the bare particulars of empirical objects. This conclusion reflects a fundamental difference between Kant and Leibniz. The latter believed that the objects that we perceive can be counted only as their appearances. On the other hand, Kant held that we cannot know much of anything without experiencing it first.

The Auseinandersetzung between Kant and Leibniz is a crucial philosophical story with implications for metaphysics, a branch of philosophy concerned with fundamental questions, causal connections, and the way the mind latches on to the world. The Auseinandersetzung with Leibniz also highlights Kant’s concern with a metaphysical universe that is prone to eternal recurrence.

Hume’s critique of Leibniz

David Hume was a thoroughgoing empiricist and the last of the three major British empiricists in the eighteenth century. Hume was of the opinion that experience and observation are the most reliable foundations for logical arguments. He anticipated the Logical Positivist movement by almost two centuries, and he sought to show that ordinary propositions about objects, causal relations, and the self can be proven without any further proof.

The logical consequences of Hume’s critique of Leibnius’s theory of causes are numerous. For one thing, the theory of causality is unjustifiable by the rules of natural deduction. But this doesn’t mean that it is impossible to establish a cause from an effect. While there is no evidence for a miracle in history, Hume’s critique of Leibniz’s axioms has profound implications for modern philosophy.

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P hilosophy essentially involves thinking hard about life’s big questions , including — as we discuss in our article on what philosophy is, how it works, as well as its four core branches — why we are here, how we can know anything about the world, and what our lives are for.

Here at Philosophy Break, we believe the practice of philosophy is the antidote to a world saturated by information, and the more that people engage with philosophy, the more fulfilling their lives will be.

The addictive nature of the digital world, for instance, afflicts many of us. The relentless torrent of information saturates our attention spans. But life is finite, and the things we give attention to define our lives. It’s crucial to break free from the turbulent current and come up for air.

As Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca put it almost 2,000 years ago in his brilliant treatise, On the Shortness of Life :

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

Streaming services hook us into one more episode, those of us with smartphones check them without thinking; but the compulsion to watch, to shop, to hit refresh on our newsfeeds — all of it can be reined in by contemplating the world around us, and our place within it.

How can we best spend our lives on earth? What makes you happy? What gives you purpose?

A lot of the anxieties and uncertainties we feel in our lives, from wondering if our occupations give us the meaning we need, to not being able to come to terms with death, are at root philosophical problems. And philosophers have confronted and had hugely insightful things to say about these problems for thousands of years.

Critically engaging with the enduring wisdom of philosophy is a fantastic way to both inform ourselves about the problems inherent within the human condition, and also face up to those problems and calm our existential fears and anxieties.

By engaging with the ideas of great thinkers throughout history, we’re empowered to think for ourselves — be it on matters of meaning and existence, how to make a better world, or simply working out what’s worth pursuing in life.

For as Socrates , the famous ancient Greek martyr of philosophy , declared:

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Philosophical contemplation is the starting gun that jolts us out of going through life as if we’re only going through the motions, living only according to the expectations of others, or living by norms we’ve never really thought about, let alone endorsed.

Philosophy opens our eyes to the multitudinous ways we can spend our lives, engendering tolerance for those whose practices differ from our own, and reawakening a childlike wonder and appreciation for the sheer mystery and opportunity lying at the heart of existence.

Why is philosophy important today?

P hilosophy is sometimes considered outdated — a perception not helped by the subject’s apparent obsession with reaching back over thousands of years to consider the works of ancient figures like Socrates , Plato , Aristotle , and Confucius .

But the point of philosophy in modern times remains the point philosophy has always had: to answer the fundamental questions that lie at the heart of the human condition.

Philosophy plays a crucial role in this regard not just in personal study and exploration, but formally in academia and modern research projects. And, even as time mercilessly advances, it turns out ancient figures whose works have survived over millennia still have some of the most interesting things to say about our human predicament, making their wisdom worth republishing and studying generation after generation.

Now, it might be thought that some of the questions philosophy touches on, such as the basic nature of the universe , or the emergence of consciousness , have been superseded by more specialist scientific subjects.

For example, physicists are at the forefront of investigating the fundamental nature of reality. Likewise, neuroscientists are leading the way in unlocking the secrets of the brain.

But philosophy is not here to compete with these brilliant, fascinating research projects, but to supplement, clarify, and even unify them.

For instance, when physicists share their latest mathematical models that predict the behavior of matter, philosophers ask, “okay, so what does this behavior tell us about the intrinsic nature of matter itself? What is matter? Is it physical, is it a manifestation of consciousness? — and why does any of this stuff exist in the first place?”

Equally, when neuroscientists make progress in mapping the brain, philosophers are on hand to digest the consequences the latest research has for our conceptions of consciousness and free will .

And, just as pertinently, while computer scientists continue to advance the sophistication of AI, philosophers discuss the implications an ever-growing machine intelligence has for society , and dissect the urgent ethical and moral concerns accompanying them.

With its focus on argument and clarity, philosophy is particularly good at rooting out the assumptions and contradictions that lie at the core of commonsensical thinking, sharpening our insight into truth, and lending security to the foundations of knowledge in all areas of research — especially the sciences, operating as they do at the frontiers of what we know.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

T he practice of philosophical reflection is not just important for progressing research, however: it is crucial for successfully navigating a world in which competing responsibilities, information, and forces pull us in various directions.

This is exactly what the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya understood when he produced his famous etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters , depicted below.

In his analysis of Goya’s etching, contemporary philosopher Simon Blackburn notes in his book Think that “there are always people telling us what we want, how they will provide it, and what we should believe”, forcefully continuing:

Convictions are infectious, and people can make others convinced of almost anything. We are typically ready to believe that our ways, our beliefs, our religions, our politics are better than theirs, or that our God-given rights trump theirs or that our interests require defensive or pre-emptive strikes against them. In the end, it is ideas for which people kill each other. It is because of ideas about what the others are like, or who we are, or what our interests or rights require, that we go to war, or oppress others with a good conscience, or even sometimes acquiesce in our own oppression by others.

With so much at stake, sleeps of reason must be countered to stop the dangerous spread of misinformation. Blackburn recommends philosophical awakening as the antidote:

Reflection enables us to step back, to see our perspective on a situation as perhaps distorted or blind, at the very least to see if there is argument for preferring our ways, or whether it is just subjective.

By deploying critical thinking and the rigor of philosophy, we are less likely to be duped or led by those who — intentionally or unintentionally — malform our thinking.

Blackburn’s advocacy for critical philosophical reflection can be paired with the full motto of Goya’s etching:

Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.

Philosophy’s transformative power

B eyond the clarification of knowledge, the greatest philosophy — like the greatest science — has enormous explanatory power that can transform how we see the world.

Just as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity skewers our everyday notion of time, so Friedrich Nietzsche’s dissection of morality challenges our everyday notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, John Locke’s analysis of color challenges our very idea of whether perception is reality, and Lucretius’s timeless reflection on death helps us cope with our mortality.

The world is uncertain, and the value of philosophy lies precisely in facing up to this uncertainty — and in finding footholds for knowledge and progress in spite of it. As the 20th-century philosophical giant Bertrand Russell summarizes in his wonderful exposition on why philosophy matters :

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

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Philosophy: What and Why?

Find a job in philosophy, what is philosophy.

Philosophy is the systematic and critical study of fundamental questions that arise both in everyday life and through the practice of other disciplines. Some of these questions concern the nature of  reality : Is there an external world? What is the relationship between the physical and the mental? Does God exist? Others concern our nature as rational, purposive, and social beings: Do we act freely? Where do our moral obligations come from? How do we construct just political states? Others concern the nature and extent of our knowledge: What is it to know something rather than merely believe it? Does all of our knowledge come from sensory experience? Are there limits to our knowledge? And still others concern the foundations and implications of other disciplines: What is a scientific explanation? What sort of knowledge of the world does science provide? Do scientific theories, such as evolutionary theory, or quantum mechanics, compel us to modify our basic philosophical understanding of, and approach to, reality? What makes an object a work of art? Are aesthetic value judgments objective? And so on.

The aim in Philosophy is not to master a body of facts, so much as think clearly and sharply through any set of facts. Towards that end, philosophy students are trained to read critically, analyze and assess arguments, discern hidden assumptions, construct logically tight arguments, and express themselves clearly and precisely in both speech and writing.

Here are descriptions of some of the main areas of philosophy:

Epistemology studies questions about knowledge and rational belief.  Traditional questions include the following: How can we know that the ordinary physical objects around us are real (as opposed to dreamed, or hallucinated, as in the Matrix)?  What are the factors that determine whether a belief is rational or irrational?  What is the difference between knowing something and just believing it?  (Part of the answer is that you can have false beliefs, but you can only know things that are true.  But that’s not the whole answer—after all, you might believe something true on the basis of a lucky guess, and that wouldn’t be knowledge!)   Some other questions that have recently been the subject of lively debate in epistemology include: Can two people with exactly the same evidence be completely rational in holding opposite beliefs?  Does whether I know something depend on how much practical risk I would face if I believed falsely?  Can I rationally maintain confident beliefs about matters on which I know that others, who are seemingly every bit as intelligent, well-informed, unbiased and diligent as I am, have come to opposite conclusions?

Metaphysics is the study of what the world is like—or (some would say) what reality consists in. Metaphysical questions can take several forms. They can be questions about what exists (questions of ontology); they can be questions what is fundamental (as opposed to derivative); and they can be questions about what is an objective feature of the world (as opposed to a mere consequence the way in which creatures like us happen to interact with that world). Questions that are central to the study of metaphysics include questions about the nature of objects, persons, time, space, causation, laws of nature, and modality. The rigorous study of these questions has often led metaphysicians to make surprising claims. Plato thought that alongside the observable, concrete world there was a realm of eternal, unchanging abstract entities like Goodness, Beauty, and Justice. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz claimed that the world was composed of tiny indivisible souls, called monads. Even today contemporary metaphysicians have been known to doubt the existence of ordinary objects, to deny the possibility of free will, and to argue that our world is just one of a plurality of worlds.

Logic is the study of the validity of patterns of inference. Logic is not a branch of psychology: It does not concern how people actually reason or which kinds of reasoning they find intuitively compelling. Rather, logic concerns the question of when a claim is conclusively supported by other claims. For instance, the inference from the claims “it is raining” and “if it is raining then the streets are wet” to the claim “the streets are wet” is logically valid – the premises conclusively support the conclusion. The validity of this specific inference, and of other inferences of the same form, is tied to the nature of the concept “if … then”. More generally, the notion of logical validity is closely connected to the nature of concepts such as “and”, “or”, “not”, “if … then”, “all”, and “some”. In studying the notion of logical validity, logicians have developed symbolic languages. These enable us to state claims clearly and precisely, and to investigate the exact structure of an argument. These languages have turned out to be useful within philosophy and other disciplines, including mathematics and computer science. Some of the questions about logic studied by members of the philosophy department include: Given that logic is not an empirical science, how can we have knowledge of basic logical truths? What is the connection between logic and rationality? Can mathematics be reduced to logic? Should we revise logic to accommodate vague or imprecise language? Should we revise logic to answer the liar paradox and other paradoxes concerning truth? 

Political philosophy is the philosophical study of concepts and values associated with political matters. For one example, is there any moral obligation to do what the law says just because the law says so, and if so on what grounds? Many have said we consent to obey. Did you consent to obey the laws? Can one consent without realizing it? Are there other grounds for an obligation to obey the law? Another central question is what would count as a just distribution of all the wealth and opportunity that is made possible by living in a political community? Is inequality in wealth or income unjust? Much existing economic inequality is a result of different talents, different childhood opportunities, different gender, or just different geographical location. What might justify inequalities that are owed simply to bad luck? Some say that inequality can provide incentives to produce or innovate more, which might benefit everyone. Others say that many goods belong to individuals before the law enters in, and that people may exchange them as they please even if this results in some having more than others. So (a third question), what does it mean for something to be yours, and what makes it yours?

The Philosophy of Language is devoted to the study of questions concerned with meaning and communication. Such questions range from ones that interact closely with linguistic theory to questions that are more akin to those raised in the study of literature. Very large questions include: What is linguistic meaning? How is the meaning of linguistic performances similar to and different from the meanings of, say, gestures or signals? What is the relationship between language and thought? Is thought more fundamental than language? Or is there some sense in which only creatures that can speak can think? To what extent does the social environment affect the meaning and use of language? Other questions focus on the communicative aspect of language, such as: What is it to understand what someone else has said? What is it to assert something? How is assertion related to knowledge and belief? And how is it that we can gain knowledge from others through language? Yet other questions focus on specific features of the languages we speak, for example: What is it a name to be a name of a particular thing? What's the relationship between the meanings of words and the meanings of sentences? Is there an important difference between literal and figurative uses of language? What is metaphor? And how does it work?

Ethics is the study of what we ought to do and what sorts of people we ought to be. Ethicists theorize about what makes acts right and wrong and what makes outcomes good and bad, and also about which motivations and traits of character we should admire and cultivate. Some other questions that ethicists try to answer are closely related to the central ones. They include: What does it mean to act freely? Under what conditions are we responsible for our good and bad acts? Are moral claims true and false, like ordinary descriptive claims about our world, and if they are what makes them so?

The History of Philosophy plays a special role in the study of philosophy. Like every other intellectual discipline, philosophy has of course a history.  However, in the case of philosophy an understanding of its history - from its ancient and medieval beginnings through the early modern period (the 17th and 18th centuries) and into more recent times - forms a vital part of the very enterprise of philosophy, whether in metaphysics and epistemology or in ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy.  To study the great philosophical works of the past is to learn about the origins and presuppositions of many of the problems that occupy philosophy today.  It is also to discover and to come to appreciate different ways of dealing with these problems, different conceptions of what the fundamental problems of philosophy are, and indeed different ways of doing philosophy altogether.  And it is also the study of works—from Plato and Aristotle, through Kant and Mill and more recent writers—that have shaped much of Western culture far beyond academic philosophy. Many of the most creative philosophers working today have also written on various topics in the history of philosophy and have found their inspiration in great figures of the past. 

Why Study Philosophy?

This question may be understood in two ways: Why would one engage in the particular intellectual activities that constitute philosophical inquiry? And how might the study of philosophy affect my future career prospects?

Philosophy as intellectual activity may have a number of motivations:

• Intellectual curiosity: philosophy is essentially a  reflective-critical inquiry  motivated by a sense of intellectual “wonder.” What is the world like? Why is it this way, rather than another? Who am I? Why am I here?
• Interest in cultural and intellectual history: as a discipline, philosophy pays a great deal of attention to its history, and to the broader cultural and intellectual context in which this history unfolds.
• Sharpening thinking skills: the study of philosophy is especially well suited to the development of a variety of intellectual skills involved in the analysis of concepts, the critique of ideas, the conduct of sound reasoning and argumentation; it is important to emphasize that philosophical inquiry also fosters intellectual creativity (developing new concepts, or new approaches to problems, identifying new problems, and so on).
• Sharpening writing skills: the writing of philosophy is especially rigorous

Philosophy might affect future career prospects in a number of ways:

• Some philosophy concentrators go on to graduate school to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy. Most of those become professors of philosophy, which means that their professional lives are devoted to research and teaching in philosophy.
• A philosophy concentration is not limiting: in fact, the skills it develops and sharpens are transferable to a wide variety of professional activities. Obvious examples include the application of reasoning and argumentation skills to the practice of law; less obvious examples include the application of analytical and critical skills to journalism, investment banking, writing, publishing, and so on; even less obvious examples include putting one’s philosophical education to work in business entrepreneurship, political and social activism, and even creative arts.

Why Does Philosophy Matter In The 21st Century?

This is KPBS Midday Edition on Maureen Cavanaugh. At a time when new discoveries and technology seem to appear in a weekly basis, it's remarkable to realize that some of our deepest philosophical questions remained virtually unchanged since the time of ancient Greece. That's why in the new book Plato at the Googleplex, the grateful officer hardly seems out of place as he appears on a cable new show. Or debates modern parenting. The book argues that philosophy is not only still relevant, but necessary to deal with the complexities of the modern world. I'd like to welcome Rebecca Newberger Goldstein she's the author of Plato at the Googleplex. Why philosophy won't go away. And welcome Rebecca. It's very nice to be here. How do you introduce Plato into the modern world in this book? I actually - - the first place they bring him to is the Googleplex. I should say you know that I based my character of Plato on a thorough immersion in the 26 dialogues that he left for us. That's very important he wrote dialogues. He didn't write treatises, inquiries, he wrote essays. He wrote dialogues. There lived conversation. That's exactly what I wanted to do with Plato, bring him into our time into conversation with us doing honor to the way that he himself wrote but also as a way of showing that he is still a living force. In our daily conversations. In your book where do these conversations take place with Plato? As I said the first places the Googleplex. At first he's extremely excited that the whole idea of the cloud is such a Platonic idea. It's knowledge existing you know abstractly not localized. He gets into a conversation with both his media escort, and an engineer as to whether ethical questions, the sort that he was - - he and Socrates were so concerned with whether they could be sourced. Whether he can come up with a search engine and the software engineer comes up with an idea for a search engine. His ethical answers search engine. To be answered with ease. These deeply complicated difficult question. And Plato's able to knock that idea down quite easily. One of the challenges to this was actually left out passages from Plato dialogues and just weave them in. I hope seamlessly to our conversations as a way of showing that there is a continuity in these questions, but also that we have made progress. That's one of the things I really wanted to show. Plato is constantly being surprised by many of the things that we take for granted that he had never considered. No slaves? Where the slaves? Now out of the famous ancient Greek philosophers why did you choose Plato for this time travel. It's not because I think Plato got it all right. I certainly don't believe that to be true. But Plato asked all the fundamental questions. It's really pretty amazing. It's amazing that philosophy is an area that has spanned many different fields of inquiry and concern. Just about every area of human concerned there's a corresponding philosophy of art, religion, art, education, science, leg which, - - line which. Plato short of mapped out that in higher landscape. He often asked the iconic question in all these different areas, and so he raised the entire submerged continent of philosophy like Atlantis. Which is a very apt metaphor to use because our first reference to Atlantis actually comes from Plato. The subtitle of your book is why philosophy won't go away. But hasn't philosophy actually gone away for many people? There is not many areas where people are actually encourage to discuss, to argue, the great questions of life. I think people are thinking about these questions. Maybe not particularly well but it may be in a muddled way, I think to be human is to reflect on these questions to add some level be asking what is all about. What are our lives was it to live a good life. We certainly think about that a great deal. For our children. And so it's one of the dialogues is Plato at the 92nd St. Y in Manhattan it was sort of the hub of intellectual debate and he is on a panel with - - of child-rearing experts. Debating the question of how to raise the exceptional child. He's with a Tiger mother, and with a more psychologically inclined thinker, and they are debating how to debate, had to raise an exceptional child and of course Plato asked the fundamental question does a child need to be exceptional? What do we really want from our children? We want them to live good lives. What does that really mean? I think on some level, we always are thinking about these questions. It's good to turn to the great thinkers. And get some guidance here. The great thinkers, the great philosophers have gotten some pushback. By scientists. Notably physicist Stephen Hawking famously said philosophy is dead because it hasn't kept up with science. There are a number of scientific thinkers who basically say, you're speculating and arguing about the nature of things, science is actually discovering the nature of things. What is your response to that. First of all the charge that philosophers have not kept up with science I would say - - scientists who say that you are being wrong philosophers. It's incumbent on philosophers to keep up. To keep up with science. I come from a scientific ground. My background was in physics. I think that charge if it were true, would be in fact a very trenchant one. There are two kinds of questions, that we humans are always interested in grappling with. One is what is the case? What kind of universe is this that we find yourself in? What are we and what is our relationship with the universe. The kind of question is what matters. Does truth matter? Does beauty matter? Does good this matter? The science matter? Does it matter to know what is? There is a way in which these questions are of what matters do we matter? I think that's a deeply emotionally resonant question. That is a deeply existential question and that we all desperately want to know the answer to. We matter? Do we matter of the universe if we don't what kind of mattering can we achieve his mattering something we are born into yours is something that we have to do something to achieve and if so what. We're all thinking about that. Is it status, as if saying, is it money, is a virtue is that happiness what is it that will make this light matter? Is a religion? Is the love of God? God loving us? There is a way in which you are all thinking about these questions of why matter. They are not scientific questions. They are philosophical ones. I don't think we can really avoid these questions. I think that we have made a lot of progress, Plato and Aristotle as great as they were, didn't have the knowledge that we have that all humans matter. On the ethical level, we all matter. To Plato and Aristotle, other Greeks matter. He did not question the institution of slavery for example. Plato has an argument against the enslavement of Greeks against other Greeks. But the thought that non-Greeks should not be enslaved that their lives matter didn't really occur to these great ethical thinkers. Whereas he slowly incrementally made this discovery. It's a philosophical one. We bring these philosophical points forward into the modern time by our underpinning of cultural acknowledged wisdom. That we bring to the questions. That's right. We'll have to start from scratch each time, and reinvent the ethical wheel. It's transmitted. The way that we do this I think is to look at our own moral inconsistencies and to try to weed them out I think that is the technique that philosophers use. Of looking at inconsistencies. It began with Socrates and the dose I have to stop you but this conversation won't stop because I want to tell my listens Rebecca Newberger Goldstein will discuss her book Plato at the Googleplex why philosophy won't go away that is tonight at 7 PM at UC San Diego's Price Ctr., East all room. I can't thank you enough, Rebecca. Thank you. Thank you so much.

At a time when discoveries and technologies seem to appear on a weekly basis, it's remarkable to realize that some of our deepest philosophical questions remain virtually unchanged since the time of ancient Greece.

That's why in the book "Plato at the Googleplex" the great philosopher hardly seems out of place, as he appears on a cable news show or debates modern parenting.

In the book, acclaimed philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues that philosophy is not only still relevant, but necessary to deal with the complexities of the modern world. She said people often ask themselves questions such as "what does it mean to live a good life."

"I think people are thinking about these questions," Goldstein told KPBS Midday Edition on Tuesday. "Maybe not particularly well. But to be human is to reflect on these questions."

Goldstein chose to focus on Plato in her book because he initially raised all the fundamental questions about life.

"Philosophy is an area that expands many areas of inquiry," she said. "Plato sort of mapped out that entire landscape. He often asked the iconic question in all these areas."

Goldstein was a featured speaker at UC San Diego Extension's Helen Edison Lecture Series .

She also joined Roger Bingham, founder of The Science Network , for a conversation titled, "What Would Plato Think about Today’s Philosophical Debates?" in January, 2015.

Chapter 1: What is Philosophy and Who Cares?

Why is philosophy important.

What is the value of philosophy? Philosophy is a branch of human inquiry and as such it aims at knowledge and understanding. We might expect that the value of philosophy lies in the value of the ends that it seeks, the knowledge and understanding it reveals. But philosophy is rather notorious for failing to establish definitive knowledge on the matters it investigates. I’m not so sure this reputation is well deserved. We do learn much from doing philosophy. Philosophy often clearly reveals why some initially attractive answers to big philosophical questions are deeply problematic, for instance. But granted, philosophy often frustrates our craving for straightforward convictions. In our first reading, Bertrand Russell argues that there is great value in doing philosophy precisely because it frustrates our desire for quick easy answers. In denying us easy answers to big questions and undermining complacent convictions, philosophy liberates us from narrow minded conventional thinking and opens our minds to new possibilities. Philosophy often provides an antidote to prejudice not by settling big questions, but by revealing just how hard it is to settle those questions. It can lead us to question our comfortably complacent conventional opinions.

With this in mind, please read Chapter 5 from Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Philosophy , “The Value of Philosophy,” and then read the following analysis and response to it.

    We humans are very prone to suffer from a psychological predicament we might call “the security blanket paradox.” We know the world is full of hazards, and like passengers after a shipwreck, we tend to latch on to something for a sense of safety. We might cling to a possession, another person, our cherished beliefs, or any combination of these. The American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce speaks of doubt and uncertainty as uncomfortable anxiety-producing states. This would help explain why we tend to cling, even desperately, to beliefs we find comforting. This clinging strategy, however, leads us into a predicament that becomes clear once we notice that having a security blanket just gives us one more thing to worry about. In addition to worrying about our own safety, we now are anxious about our security blanket getting lost or damaged. The asset becomes a liability. The clinging strategy for dealing with uncertainty and fear becomes counterproductive.

While not calling it by this name, Russell describes the intellectual consequences of the security blanket paradox vividly:

The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason. . . The life of the instinctive man is shut up within the circle of his private interests. . . In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparison with which the philosophic life is calm and free. The private world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins.The primary value of philosophy according to Russell is that it loosens the grip of uncritically held opinion and opens the mind to a liberating range of new possibilities to explore.The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. . . Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.

Here we are faced with a stark choice between the feeling of safety we might derive from clinging to opinions we are accustomed to and the liberation that comes with loosening our grip on these in order to explore new ideas. The paradox of the security blanket should make it clear what choice we should consider rational. Russell, of course, compellingly affirms choosing the liberty of free and open inquiry. Must we remain forever uncertain about philosophical matters? Russell does hold that some philosophical questions appear to be unanswerable (at least by us). But he doesn’t say this about every philosophical issue. In fact, he gives credit to philosophical successes for the birth of various branches of the sciences. Many of the philosophical questions we care most deeply about, however – like whether our lives are significant, whether there is objective value that transcends our subjective interests – sometimes seem to be unsolvable and so remain perennial philosophical concerns. But we shouldn’t be too certain about this either. Russell is hardly the final authority on what in philosophy is or isn’t resolvable. Keep in mind that Russell was writing 100 years ago and a lot has happened in philosophy in the mean time (not in small part thanks to Russell’s own definitive contributions). Problems that looked unsolvable to the best experts a hundred years ago often look quite solvable by current experts. The sciences are no different in this regard. The structure of DNA would not have been considered knowable fairly recently. That there was such a structure to discover could not even have been conceivable prior to Mendel and Darwin (and here we are only talking 150 years ago).

Further, it is often possible to make real progress in understanding issues even when they can’t be definitively settled. We can often rule out many potential answers to philosophical questions even when we can’t narrow things down to a single correct answer. And we can learn a great deal about the implications of and challenges for the possible answers that remain.

Even where philosophy can’t settle an issue, it’s not quite correct to conclude that there is no right answer. When we can’t settle an issue this usually just tells us something about our own limitations. There may still be a specific right answer; we just can’t tell conclusively what it is. It’s easy to appreciate this point with a non-philosophical issue. Perhaps we can’t know whether or not there is intelligent life on other planets. But surely there is or there isn’t intelligent life on other planets. Similarly, we may never establish that humans do or don’t have free will, but it still seems that there must be some fact of the matter. It would be intellectually arrogant of us to think that a question has no right answer just because we aren’t able to figure out what that answer is.

• What is the Value of Philosophy. Authored by : W. Russ Payne. Provided by : Bellevue College. Located at : https://commons.bellevuecollege.edu/wrussellpayne/an-introduction-to-philosophy/ . Project : https://commons.bellevuecollege.edu/wrussellpayne/an-introduction-to-philosophy/. License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial

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Kant’s Philosophical Development

Modern philosophy begins with Kant, and yet he marks the end of the “Modern” epoch (1600–1800 CE) in the history of philosophy. [ 1 ] The appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 marks the end of the modern period and the beginning of something entirely new. Today his texts are read on all continents, and his thought has had a profound impact on nearly all subsequent philosophical discussions. The 2004 bicentennial of his death, for instance, was reflected in conferences in Austria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Iran, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Senegal, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and Turkey.

Like other watershed figures, Kant has contributed to the shape of world civilization, and the conceptualization we have of the world today. His practical ideas, such as the Categorical Imperative and its implications (1785), informed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Political and Economic Covenants (1966), and the International Criminal Court (2002). His exploration of natural sciences and his metaphysical ideas, particularly those of his pre-critical period (1747–1770), are stunning. Kant gave the first account of the evolutionary reciprocity of spacetime and momentum-energy, and formulated the first general law of free field radiation (1747). He suggested the conceptual solution of the three body problem, which emerges in the interplay of Earth, Moon, and Sun (1754). He was the first to construct a detailed evolutionary cosmology (1755). His ideas on biospherical dynamics allowed him to predict the rhythms of the monsoon and the oscillation of coastal winds (1755–1757). He suggested that the building blocks of matter are energy bubbles (1756)—an idea that is useful today in superstring theory in the guise of Calabi-Yau manifolds.

A number of recent findings have helped to shed more light on Kant’s philosophical development.

First, in terms of science, it now appears that his metaphysics has withstood the test of time. While traditional scholars largely dismiss his holistic ontology prior to the Critique , innovations in the environmental and physical sciences have validated Kant’s claims as realistic insights in the workings of nature. His evolutionary theory of the universe is now seen as “the essence of modern models” in cosmology (Coles 2001: 240), and his natural philosophy is seen as the last milestone of western philosophy prior to its “comedown” to skepticism (Hawking 2003, 166). In light of climate change, it stands to reason that Kant’s grasp on biospherical dynamics and sustainable policies may well spur a philosophical return to Kant in the near future.

Second, in terms of religion, important recent scholarship indicates an ambivalence, if not dislike of Christianity—something that his early biographers, all of them Lutheran theologians, took pains to avoid revealing. [ 2 ] Kant can be seen as defending pantheism, naturalism, evolution, cosmic expansion theory and holism, even when doing so was incompatible with an academic career.

In the 18 th Century university system defending such views often led to dismissal and/or lack of promotion. Kant, himself, was always cautious when writing on such topics. In the context of censorship, writers tend to become circumspect. To avoid trouble, they may publish something anonymously; or they may make oblique remarks instead of direct statements; or they may have second thoughts and retract earlier statements. Kant did all three things. But, for later readers in increasingly secular ages, it is easy to miss Kant’s subtleties and implications.

Third, in terms of culture, Kant’s early views may be placed in a global rather than a purely Western context. Recent research suggests that key ideas of Kant’s natural philosophy also have sources in Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian thought, which were disseminated in continental Europe by Jesuits based in China, popularized by Leibniz and Wolff, and further developed by Wolff’s Sinophile student Bilfinger. [ 3 ] One example is the idea of dialectics that Bilfinger found in the Chinese classics, and which Kant encountered in the proceedings of the Russian academy. Importation and serious consideration of eastern thought was in its infancy during the end of the modern period, and Kant was unaware of the Far Eastern roots of the notions that influenced him. The historical irony is that he dismissed nonwestern cultures while being deeply influenced by their insights.

Scholars split Kant’s development into stages:

• the pre-critical period (1745–1770), during which Kant works within the tradition of Leibniz/Wolff and writes his impressive early works on natural phenomena;
• “silent decade” (1770–1781), during which Kant refrained from publishing texts other than advertisements and endorsements for classes;
• the critical period (1781–1791), which marks the time of insights or “the astonishing decade” (Beck 1969: 433) of his critical philosophy; and
• the post-critical period (1798–1802), often cited as works of old age. [ 4 ]

Recent studies indicate that Kant’s philosophical development was far more unified (Schönfeld 2000), and, in terms of its stages, involved deeper continuities (Edwards 2000) than previously recognized. From the start, Kant was pushing quite a unique agenda. Recent scholarship contends Kant’s earliest works are not only commensurate and continuous with his late claims, but also offer insight into some oddities of the critical period, such as the Third Analogy of the Critique . [ 5 ] The new picture of Kant’s development indicates that his intellectual trajectory was not as fractured and erratic as scholarship used to assume, and it also indicates that Kant was not a late bloomer, but, rather, that he was innovative from the start.

The following account covers Kant’s development from his upbringing to the critical period. Its theme is his intellectual formation: the influences in his youth and education; his views on natural philosophy, ontology and cosmology shaped during his early adulthood; the questions subsequently pursued; and the historical fate of his answers. [ 6 ]

1. Childhood: “The Starry Sky Above Me and the Moral Law Within Me”

2. youth: “in the servitude of fanatics”, 3. student years: “marking out the path to be taken”, 4. dynamic debut: “radiation in the inverse square”, 5. newtonian stargazing: “the splendor of a single universal rule”, 6. systematic cosmology: “all things in the universe interactively connect”, 7. crisis and critique: “groping among mere concepts”, other internet resources, related entries.

Immanuel Kant was born April 22, 1724 in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), as the eldest son of Anna Regina Kant, née Reuter, (1697–1737) and Johann Georg Kant (1683–1746). The Reuters were shoe- and harness-makers; the Kants were harness-makers ( Riemer , a guild similar to saddlers). Originally, the Reuters were from Nuremberg in Bavaria; the Kants were from not-too-distant Tilsit (now Sovietsk, Oblast Kaliningrad; Russia). The union of Kants and Reuters provided an initial economic, emotional and religious stability for Kant during his early years. His grandfather and father were competent businessmen, initially flourishing and respected in their strata of society. Anna was Lutheran and fit well into the like-minded Königsberg culture.

Immanuel’s early childhood seems to have been idyllic. The family was rather well off. The parents got along and loved their son. Johann Kant appears to have been a gentle and hardworking man. Anna Kant, who took care of the family’s paperwork, was well educated. Little Immanuel was her constant company, and her influence on him was considerable.

After “Manelchen” could walk, Anna Kant took him out for walks in the meadows and fields. She taught him what she could, of the seasons, the plants and animals, and the sky. Her little son responded eagerly with questions; and the mother encouraged his outdoor curiosity with praise, patience, and more information (Wasianski 1804: 247).

These details of nature provided a formative background for Kant’s interest in natural philosophy, and the child grew up in an encouraging environment for early explorations. Königsberg enjoys a cool and gentle climate; typical of high latitudes, the flat Baltic terrain has not much biological diversity, and its biomes—meadows, moors, deciduous and conifer forests—are not hostile. At Kant’s time, bears and wolves were common along with other local fauna, but these posed no serious threat to Kant’s earliest encounters with nature. Walks, as the ones he enjoyed at the edge of town, were fun and perfectly safe. For Prussians at the time, excursions into nature also had a spiritual subtext. Like Japanese Shinto, German tradition invests natural places with meaning. The late and superficial conversion of the Baltic lands to Christianity, after the fourteenth century, coupled with the fact that persecution drove pagan faiths temporarily underground instead of eliminating them altogether, allowed the ancient nature-worship to prevail in forms inoffensive to the clergy, under the guise of outdoor walks. Thus people used to attend Sunday service—before heading out for their Sonntagsspaziergang .

During Kant’s earliest years, the local influence of Pietism grew. This Christian movement, founded by Jakob Spener (1635–1705) and promoted by August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), had spread north from Dresden, Leipzig, and Halle. It reached Königsberg at the turn of the century, making inroads with the creation of schools and orphanages. As Luther’s Reformation had been the effort to return Roman Catholicism to a purer faith, Pietism tried to purify Lutheranism, stripping it of dogma and detail. The Protestant Church avoided a schism in Prussia, but at the price of friction between the Lutheran mainstream, orthodoxy, and the Pietist firebrands. Pietism stressed literal exegesis, quiet humility, and charitable deeds. It allowed believers to practice a spirituality of mystical intensity—but as the purge of Halle University (1723) illustrates, it had a totalitarian streak.

The local authorities frowned on the movement, but the Pietists enjoyed protection of King Friedrich Wilhelm I (reign 1713–40) and thus persisted. In 1731, the field chaplain Franz Albert Schulz came to town, rising to become the local leader of the movement. He was appointed to director of the Pietist high school (the Collegium Fridericianum ) and later to professor of theology. One of his early converts was Immanuel’s mother, who brought her children to his bible sessions.

Schulz’s brand of Pietism differed from either Spener’s or Francke’s and “was fraught with deep ambiguities, having a component that was seen elsewhere as contrary to the basic tenets of true faith”(Kuehn 2001a: 39). Schulz’s Pietism straddled the line between Wolffian, rationalistic philosophy and enthusiastic religious sentiment. It stood for the equality of all to interpret the Bible and a practical faith through charitable acts, while at the same time endorsing the political ambitions of Frederick I. It was a grassroots movement that the emphasized the personal nature of religion in contrast to establishment orthodoxy; politically, it allied itself with the common citizen over the nobility. In Königsberg it was a divisive influence that was in constant struggle with local authorities. In Kant’s formative years, Königsberg was a place of religious upheaval, Pietists vs Orthodox Lutheranism, and this marked, local conflict, in addition to the more widespread decimation of the 30 Years War, was to inform his position of religious toleration and a separation of religion and philosophy.

According to Kant’s later judgment (Wasianski 1804: 246; tr. Kuehn 2001a: 31), his mother lived out a positive form of Pietism, blending love, tolerance, and spirituality into a faith that was “genuine” and “not in the least enthusiastic” (‘enthusiasm’ or Schwärmerei means fundamentalism). The child’s formation was apparently not hurt by Anna’s piety; instead of turning into an intolerant zealot, as many Pietist’s “enthusiasm” did, she instilled a reverence for nature and spiritualism, a plausible sense of right and wrong, and always respected him as a person.

Kant is said to have claimed,

I will never forget my mother, for she implanted and nurtured in me the first germ of goodness; she opened my heart to the impressions of nature; she awakened and furthered my concepts, and her doctrines have had a continual and beneficial influence in my life. (Jachmann 1804: 169; tr. Kuehn 2001a: 31)

Later, he would develop a metaphysics whose claims would anticipate scientific discoveries, and an ethics that culminated in the Categorical Imperative. His friends chose the dictum from the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) for his tombstone:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. (5:161.33–6; tr. Guyer 1992: 1)

Had it not been for his sensitive and intelligent mother, his life might well have taken an entirely different course.

As Immanuel grew older, hardships befell the family. After the death of his maternal grandfather (1729), the Kants suffered from a series of events that would eventually ruin the family. The death left the harness-shop downtown without leadership and Anna’s mother without a provider. To compensate, the Kant’s moved into the home of Anna’s mother on the outskirts of the city, in the Sattlerstrasse , the saddler-street, a less prosperous part of the city. The saddlers, a guild distinct from harness-makers while producing similar goods, did not welcome the competition. Johann Kant became the target of the saddle-makers’ hostility, and the business failed to prosper in the new location. Income steadily declined, and further hardship occurred with the death of Anna Regina (1737). Just thirteen years old, Immanuel must have keenly felt the loss of his first tutor regarding nature and religious sentiment. [ 7 ]

When Immanuel was six or seven, he went to the Hospitalschule , a grammar school at the local clinic, whose teacher was a Pietist candidate in theology. In 1732, Pastor Schulz, who knew the child through Anna, arranged for Immanuel, now eight, to continue his education at the Collegium Fridericianum . For a child of working-class parents, such as Kant, this was a fortunate opportunity. Instead of the traditional path, apprenticeship at his father’s shop and the eventual inheritance of the workshop, Immanuel was given the opportunity for higher education, under the assumption he would pursue a religious or civil vocation. Practically speaking, this would raise Kant in the eyes of society and offer him the opportunity to raise himself above the rank and economics into which he was born. One might conjecture that the sensitive and bright Kant would look forward to the possibility of advancement. Unfortunately, the tutelage he received there was a rather more stringent form of Pietism than the one he found at home under the instruction of his mother.

Kant would later judge the time of youth as the hardest years of life, ruled by discipline, loneliness, and lack of freedom ( Lectures on Pedagogy , w. 1776–87, p. 1803; 9:485.13–17). School, at the Collegium , was held six days a week. Sundays were spent with homework and prayer. Primary subjects of instruction were Latin and religion. Only male pupils were admitted; there was no way to meet girls or socialize, and, as the son of a harness-maker, Kant was already at a significant social disadvantage. The later stages of his primary education (what we would call high school) definitely changed his life for the worse. Immanuel was to attend high school until 1740, when he was sixteen.

Moreover, the education was not even of great quality. Only rather elementary math was offered, and natural philosophy (biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and astronomy) was not taught at all. Pupils were groomed for administrative and clerical careers, so science was considered a luxury not to be indulged. The sciences were also suspect from the theological perspectives of his instructors. Pietist indifference to inquiry and fundamentalist denial of facts resulted in contemptuous hostility toward science. As late as the 1750s, the clergy rejected the heliocentric system and frowned on Newton’s celestial mechanics as fiction. Pietist theologians such as Franz Budde (1667–1729), Joachim Lange (1670–1744), and Andreas Rüdiger (1673–1731) argued that the Bible teaches everything worth knowing of nature. The later Pietist thinker Christian August Crusius (1715–75) essentially concurred. For Pietism, particularly in its Saxon center, Halle, education was for practical management of life’s affairs, not an endeavor with intrinsic worth. Mathematics was useful for bookkeeping but worthless for describing reality. Physics was acceptable as long as its findings did not undermine the Bible. As independent research programs, however, the sciences were deemed wellsprings of heresy. [ 8 ] Standard curriculum included a heavy dose of theology, catechism memorization and biblical stories. Although the school did offer a variety of topics: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, logic, history (both church and philosophy) and geography, the primary use of this instruction was in preparation for further theological study at the university. Education at the Collegium was always in the service of the Pietist programmatic, conversion and salvation of souls.

In Halle, Pietism found its epicenter and religious temperament. In Königsberg, however, Pietism—at the extent of its influence in the 1730s—was moderated by the task to proselytize to the mainstream. Under Schulz’s guidance, ideological fervor was reined in by the need for flexibility when making converts. Thus in Königsberg, it was not as monolithic as further south. With his earliest education at the Collegium , Kant was to suffer from the more severe form of pedagogical ideals. During his university years, he would enjoy more moderate educational ideals, as Kant’s later university teacher, Martin Knutzen (1713–51), illustrates. A passionate Pietist, Knutzen studied Newton and discussed the ideas of Leibniz and Wolff—possible for Pietists in East Prussia, but impossible for Pietists in Central Prussia and Saxony.

During high school this moderation was not felt. The instructors at the Collegium were stern. Pietist schooling involved a rigorous schedule, strict adherence to religious dogma, and instruction by repetitive drills. The school’s goals were two-fold, to save it’s pupils from “religious corruption” and to improve their “worldly well-being” (Kuehn 2001a: 46). Strict adherence to regimen, dogma and practical applications were essential to these two goals. A former classmate, David Ruhnken, criticized the “discipline of the fanatics” (letter to Kant 10 Mar. 1771; 10:117.15); another classmate and life-long friend, Theodor Hippel (1741–96), spoke of Kant’s “terror and fear” whenever Kant would later recall the “slavery of his youth” (Malter 1992: 95; tr. Kuehn 2001a: 45).

Typical penalties for infractions, next to physical punishment, were what would be called “guilt trips” today. In contrast to Catholicism (where sins are forgiven in confession), Protestant salvation depends on grace. The faithful cannot rely on a ritual for exoneration; non-Catholic Christians steadily collect sins. They can only do their best and better their odds for deliverance by remorseful introspection. Pietism honed remorse into a fine art. Essential to salvation is a sense of guilt—more an emotion, actually, than a sense ( Schuldgefühl ). God’s grace will wipe the slate clean, but grace is neither predictable nor verifiable. The only measure, if there is any, is the intensity of shame—the stronger the cultivated feelings of guilt, the better the chances for salvation. The education at the Collegium institutionalized this guilt and sought to properly instruct its charges with a contrite spirit and sense of conservative propriety. One should feel an enthusiastic guilt and sense of turpitude in an effort to become a better citizen, both spiritually and practically.

With the exception of a certain Heydenreich, a friendly Latinist who introduced Kant to Lucretius’s De rerum natura (Borowski 1804: 38–9), high school stunted Kant’s growth. He excelled at Latin, an emphasis at the school, and Greek, but struggled with theology and arithmetic. He appears to have enjoyed classic authors under the guidance of Heydenreich and many thought he would take up classics at university.

The lack of scientific training would hamper his later explorations of nature. He tried to make up for it at the university in 1740, but his mathematics instructor, Privatdozent Christian Ammon (1696–1742) was ignorant of the calculus (Kuehn 2001b: 13–16)—an essential tool for understanding the cutting-edge physical research of the day. Kant’s quantitative skills were to remain substandard; when he calculated, the results usually came out all wrong (Adickes 1924a: 73–83; 1924b: 1:38–9). This lack in mathematical training played into his belated comprehension of Newton’s work, yet did not harm Kant’s appreciation for him. Such a substandard education in arithmetic, philosophy and the sciences were the norm at the Collegium Fridericianum , and Kant would have to continually work to make up for this early deficit.

Hence Kant’s later contributions to natural science would have to remain of a conceptual sort. They amounted to brilliant aperçus—but it was later physicists, not Kant, who articulated them rigorously and substantiated them empirically.

High school may have also affected the development of Kant’s ethics. In the absence of data, this effect is conjectural. Still, common sense suggests that his later interest in dignity and the value of autonomy might have been influenced by the treatment he suffered and witnessed in school. It makes sense that a thinker who recalls the “slavery of his youth” with “terror and fear” would insist that treating humanity as an end, instead of a means only, is a Categorical Imperative.

Moreover, these experiences may also explain Kant’s exclusion of emotion from ethics; a curious exclusion, given his emphasis of the importance of the good will ( Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals 1785; 4:393–5). Anna Kant died in 1737, when Immanuel was thirteen. From then on, the sensitive teenager associated “morality under the guidance of feeling” only negatively. This may be due, in part, to the daily exposure to the guilt associated with the doctrines of morality to which Immanuel was exposed at the Collegium . And without a mother as an affectionate and sane counterweight, the oppressiveness and negative associations of guilt and morality must have taken its toll. He suffered the pious whim of teachers, eager to instill feelings of guilt for the sake of salvation. His later contempt for emotion is arguably unjustified, but his upbringing suggests an explanation.

When Kant entered the University of Königsberg in 1740, he was sixteen. Financial considerations at home left much to be desired. His widowed father filed his taxes as a pauper. But, a maternal uncle, shoemaker Richter, supported Immanuel’s studies. In addition, Immanuel supplemented his uncle’s beneficence by working as a tutor to fellow students. Often he did so for free, but, on occasion, Kant would accept luxuries to supplement his modest means. He was a sober and quiet student, not engaging in the frivolous activities common to university students. [ 9 ] Yet Kant was no drudge either. He enjoyed playing billiards, and did so with such skill that he and his companions often won small sums of money to help defray the cost of living. As a member of the university, Kant had risen to a new rank within society. In so doing, he enjoyed privileges of this class and exemptions from duties e.g., military service/conscription, to which the lower classes were susceptible. For a person of slight build and fragile constitution, Kant’s upward social status concomitant exemptions very likely saved his life.

Pastor Schulz had hoped the university student Kant would pursue a church career, but instead he took courses in logic, ethics, metaphysics, natural law, and mathematics. Martin Knutzen (1713–1751), Kant’s advisor, introduced him to the Principia (1687) and the Optics (1704), and probably led him to think about natural philosophy. Additionally, Kant attended classes with Johann Gottfried Teske (1704–1772), whose courses on electricity and experimental physics would inspire Kant’s doctoral dissertation De Igne or Meditations on Fire (1755).

Four years into his university education, the Kant family suffered another set-back. In 1744, Kant’s father, Johann, suffered a stroke. Immanuel, twenty years old and now the head of the family, attended to his father’s health and stopped attending classes the following year. He started writing on natural philosophy around this time, trying to determine the properties of force, a theme much in currency at the time. In 1746, he buried his father, wrote the bulk of his first work, submitted it to the censor, and secured a publisher. A year later, in 1747, he completed the Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces , settled the family’s affairs, found homes for his younger brother and three sisters, and moved in with another student. The Living Forces is his first known text, first publication, and first book.

But when Kant completed it, he withdrew from the university. In 1748, he left town, without a degree, to work as a tutor for a noble family in the countryside.

It is tempting to explain Kant’s academic failure with financial reasons—his parents were deceased and the children had no savings. Ostensibly Kant was responsible for not merely himself, but for his siblings as well. Finances were tight, at the very best. However, the Kant family did have a benefactor, their uncle Richter, who paid his course fees when Kant was enrolled and financed his publication (Borowski 1804: 46; Lasswitz 1902: 521). Richter would keep supporting him and paid the printer for his second book (1755), too. Poverty was thus not likely the reason for his withdrawing. Nor was it the lack of a thesis. The Living Forces is a technical tract, 256 pages in the 1749-edition, more than enough for a Magister -degree.

Yet Kant wrote the book in German, not in the Latin required for academic theses, although high school had provided him with excellent philological skills. Apparently he had not intended to submit the Living Forces as his Master’s thesis. Why?

The contents supply the key. He declares that he shall criticize Leibniz and Wolff (ii, 1:7). He rejects the doctrine of pre-established harmony according to which substances do not interact, rejecting Leibniz’s claim ( Monadology 1714: sec. 7) that substances have no “windows”. For Kant, they do. Following Knutzen (who had earned his doctorate with a similar critique in 1735) he says that substances change each other’s states by their mutual actions (#4, 1:19). He also rejects Wolff’s notion of a “moving force”. Kant argues (#3, 1:18) that force and motion have little to do with one another. Force is not so much about motion and more about being. So a “moving force” is a misnomer. For Kant, living forces are better described as the dynamic source for nature, an “active force” or a vis activa .

That Kant criticized Leibniz and Wolff should have improved his chances at graduation. Knutzen questioned their views, too. And critically evaluating Leibniz and Wolff was the righteous thing to do, even in the moderate Pietist atmosphere of Kant’s university. The theologian Lange in Halle had orchestrated Wolff’s expulsion from Prussia (1723) and triggered a furious row over Wolff’s Leibnizian leanings (1723–40). Other Pietists followed suit and rejected Wolff because his support of Leibnizian harmony. This, combined with his view of the world as a network of uniform substances, smelled of heresy. Wolff was considered a dangerous radical. But Kant’s reasons for criticizing Wolff were different—Wolff was not radical enough.

Kant lays out his view in the first ten sections. Everything begins with force. It is even prior to extension, as Leibniz had already said (#1; 1:17). Here Leibniz is right, Kant thinks, and praises him for having shed light on the Aristotelian concept of the entelechy, and Leibniz’s recovery of the basis for substantial forms. Yet Leibniz does not go far enough. Nature’s units are active forces (#1–3; 1:17–18). Their action is constructive; they make and sustain the fabric of nature. The world is a tapestry of energy concentrations. Forces rule everything, not only bodily motions (#2; 1:18.6–8), but all activities (#3; 1:18.27–36). This includes mind-body interaction—materially produced ideas and mentally intended actions (#6; 1:20.35–21.1; 21.14–16).

Dynamic action is absolutely fundamental. Force has effects by acting externally ( ausser sich wirken ; #4; 1:19.5), and, in the full sense of the word, external action locates force (#6; 1:20.36–1:21.1). A force acts by radiating its action; it spreads its effects out ( ihre Wirkungen von sich ausbreiten ; #10; 1:24.23), and this spread determines its source as being inside it, locating force in virtue of its action. With action comes location ( Ort ), with location space ( Raum ), and with space the universe ( Welt )—and none of this would be without force. Localized forces weave the world (#8) such that their interaction forms networks (#7), braiding relation, order, and space (#9, 1:23.5–9). Force is the primum , knitting space and everything within.

As one source acts on what is outside of it, multiple sources act on one another. They do so when their fields meet. For example, throw two pebbles into a pond and watch the interfering ripples: first, point sources encounter each other’s activities at the boundary of their expanding radiations; next, these pulses, when striking each other, are modified when struck. External modifications of a radiation affect its internal makeup. Since force is an active pulse, and since activity, for Kant, describes force better than anything else, a collision with another field has constitutive effects on the original activity. (Consider weather—when air masses collide, they affect each other’s dew point, temperature, or pressure.) Hence Kant concludes that the action of force-points amounts to mutual changes of their internal states (#4; 1:19.4–6).

Dynamic expansion and interaction through location makes space, and reciprocal action creates structure. Force-points stretch, grip, and take hold, and the mutually modifying engagements constitute their connections (#7; 1:21.30–33). This has consequences. That force, in virtue of its action, is put “somewhere” suggests a bond of force and space. This interactive bond is constitutive of reality.

These bold ideas doomed the text. A Christian advisor, even an open-minded one, could never approve it. The dynamic ontology in chapter 1 contradicts the genesis account found in the Bible. According to the Bible, God is the creator of everything. But Kant suggests that force creates everything—force, not God, is the creator of nature. Worse, force can be modeled mathematically, as he argues in chapter 2, and it can be jointly determined by two quantities, as he argues in chapter 3. “God” is merely a placeholder for the cause of force itself.

Now Kant speaks of God as possible maker of multiple universes (#8; 1:22), as engineer of dimensions (#11; 1:25), and as sealing off this world from improbable others (ibid.). But in the same breath (#7–10), he makes force responsible for these tasks. And he already showed his hand in his praise for the entelechy. Entelechies are programs of the self-organization and sustenance of things—in Aristotle’s words, a dynamis put en ergon or put in action; i.e., energeia .

Kant’s waffling over God and force permits only two readings. Neither of them would be palatable to any Christian worth his salt: either God is creative force, or God created creative force. By Kant’s account, the former would mean that God is describable as a physical quantity. The latter would imply that force, not God, created the universe. Whoever suggests either is not a believer and does not deserve to graduate under a Pietist advisor, not even a liberal one.

So Kant was passed over. Knutzen never recommended him, and in Knutzen’s letters to Leonard Euler (1707–83), he is not on the list of excellent students (Waschkies 1987: 20). The professor had more regular favorites, such as Johann Weitenkampf (b. 1726) and Friedrich Buck (1722–86), who succeeded to Knutzen’s chair (Pozzo 1993: 283–322; Kuehn 2001b: 23).

Kant took resort to irony (#4; 1:21.3–8) and avenged himself by not mentioning his teacher—ever. Many years later (1770), after Knutzen’s death, when Kant finally enjoyed some public recognition, he would secure his long-desired professorship by striking a deal with the administration to snatch Knutzen’s chair from Buck, pushing the pet student to another post without even asking.

A word by Seneca sets the tune for Kant’s debut—“Nothing is more important than to go where one ought to go, instead of following the herd, like cattle, and go where they went”. [ 10 ] Kant expresses the hope that “the freedom I take of contradicting great men won’t be construed as a crime” (1:7.6–9). He needed hope because he had made up his mind. He knew what he was doing, and he was defiant. “My basis is as follows,” he writes (1:10.25–7), “I have already marked out the path that I shall take. I shall set out on my course, and nothing shall stop me from proceeding along it”.

Kant’s own intent was to understand the powers of nature and he set out to solve the puzzle of force. The Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces was a contribution to the so-called vis-viva -controversy; its goal was to settle the issue once and for all. The issue was as simple as it is profound: what is force, and how can it be measured?

The controversy had begun in the previous century and was rife through the entirety of the modern period. Following the implications of his mechanical description of physical substances, Descartes argued that force is reducible to the mathematical quantity of motion observable in matter. Descartes contended that this quantity is conserved in the universe. Nature is matter in motion, and motion is the explanatory principle. “Force” is the product of mass and velocity ( mv ), a quantity called “quantity of motion” or “dead pressure” then and momentum now. [ 11 ] Beyond this, for Descartes, “force” has no further meaning. Cartesian essence can be isolated to physical and mental substances and force is neither of these. Force is not a dynamic essence, nor an essence at all. It is merely a quantity of motion calculable in another substance. By his rendering, Descartes reduced physics to kinematics.

Leibniz rejected the Cartesian formulation. When examining rising and falling bodies, he recognized that their behavior reveals a different quantity, derived from Galileo’s law of fall, which is the product of mass and velocity squared ( mv² ). Leibniz thought this implied Descartes’s quantity to be false and that only mv² , not mv , is conserved. Leibniz called this new quantity “living force” ( vis viva ); we call it kinetic energy now. Force is real, he argued, and it is more than a quantity ( mv of Decartes)— it is the basic quality of nature and its activity can be observed in nature. Leibniz expanded physics to a dynamics.

Leibniz was correct about rising and falling bodies, but the Cartesians (Descartes had died in 1650) pointed to other experiments in support of the mv -formula. Unfortunately for the early debate, the issue could not be decided—because both sides had been right; there is both momentum and kinetic energy. So the arguments continued for decades. After Leibniz’s death (1716), the controversy continued through his followers, who quarreled with the current crop of French Cartesians. Newtonians were split over vis viva ; Newton and his British fans rejected it, while continental Newtonians accepted it. After Newton’s death (1727), in the 1740s, the issue was settled—in Newton’s favor. D’Alembert proved that there is a place for both quantities in physics (1743). Before that, Euler (1737) had already found out that Descartes’s momentum is Newton’s force acting over time, and Leibniz’s kinetic energy is Newton’s force acting through space. It did take, however, a while before this information spread and became generally accepted. The debate died down around the time Kant published the Living Forces (1749).

Kant’s debut was one of the many attempts at settling the dispute, but for all practical purposes, it was a failure. The Living Forces appeared too late to make any difference, and Kant was unaware of d’Alembert’s and Euler’s research. But what doomed the book in the public eye was that Kant seemed to have bet on the wrong team of horses. He argued for a synthesis of Cartesian kinematics and Leibnizian dynamics, and did so at the expense of Newtonian mechanics. At the time he grasped Newton’s ideas only partially. He did not yet understand that motion, like rest, is a state (something Galileo had discovered) and that force is needed only for changing, not for keeping a state (which is Newton’s first law of motion). He not only implicitly rejected Newton through such mistakes, but also explicitly questions his authority (preface, 1:7). Later in the book, he criticizes the first law of motion (#50–51, #97–8), suggests an alternative to Newtonian inertia (#124–5, #132–3), and dismisses as a “desperate excuse” Newton’s view that loss of motion reveals nature’s entropic tendency (#50; 1:59). He tried to determine force without even mentioning the second law of motion that defines it as the product of mass and acceleration. For Kant, Newtonian mechanics was irrelevant. While there are hundreds of references to Descartes and Leibniz in the book, the references to Newton can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

In fact, however, Kant was not as mistaken as it seemed at the time. For one thing, he arrived essentially at the same conclusion as d’Alembert and Euler: both mv and mv² are legitimate, determinable quantities. More importantly, he proposed a deep connection. While showing in chapter 2 that Descartes’s quantity is empirically well supported, he argued in chapter 3 that Leibniz’s quantity must be factored in to arrive at a full qualitative understanding of force. “Active force” is jointly measurable as “dead pressure” and “living force”—the full account of force requires a synthesis of Cartesian kinematics and Leibnizian dynamics, notwithstanding their conflicts.

That is, Kant not only regarded momentum and energy as relevant quantities, as d’Alembert had done, but he grasped that their union points to the universal nature of force. This was sharper than even Euler’s insight. Euler had discovered that these quantities are derivable from Newtonian force and that there is accordingly a quantitative connection among them. But Kant invested this connection with qualitative meaning, arguing that the structure of nature must be understood in dynamic terms, and that Newton really misses the point. The title of the book, “Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces” is no idle boast, for Kant’s “true estimation” is the insight that “living force” and “dead pressure” are two sides of the same coin. Throughout the book, he wrestles with the harmony of opposites, Cartesian kinematics and Leibnizian dynamics, trying to marry momentum and energy—while having the audacity to criticize Newton. This is the thrust of the work. Taken as a prediction, it is superb. With his first publication, Kant intuited not only that matter is ultimately energetic, but also that its dynamic measure is momentum-energy. [ 12 ]

This aperçu was no lucky guess. Kant understood what force involves. He argues that force is the essence of action (#4). This action is a pulse that “broadens out” (#9–10). Out-broadening of force ( ausbreiten ; 1:24.23) is an out-stretching of space ( Ausdehnung ; 1:24.6). Force makes the continuum, being governed, in turn, by the created structure (#10). This shift in understanding the nature of force correspondingly alters the nature one must think of material objects and dynamic interaction. The origin and source is force, and not substance, as the Cartesians had insisted. Force is responsible for substance, quantification and laws of nature—not the other way around. In this bold thesis Kant anticipates his more famous “Copernican turn”—an inversion of the way we view nature—but in this context he is still working in the field of natural philosophy of his day. Dynamic interaction turns force into a field and the void into a plenum. Kant anticipated that momentum-energy is the substantial correlate of spacetime. Bypassing Newton, he caught up with Einstein. [ 13 ]

Connected with this apercu is the proposed bond of force and space—“force” understood as momentum-energy, Kant’s active essence of substance, and “space” defined as Kant’s dimensional continuum. For Kant, force grips the void, holding it as a dimensional presence that localizes the original pulse. Force extends space, ordering it, and space places force, governing it. Space dynamically expands; force structurally acts. Each needs the other. Without force, space would lack structure ( Abmessungen or Dimensionen , #9–10) and could not place a world (#7–9, 11). Without space, force could not be a field (#10). Force is spaced and space is forced. This is their bond (1:23–4). Indeed: mass stretches spacetime, and spacetime grips mass.

In fact, Kant caught up with modern physics in several regards. Another of his insights is so basic that it is easy to miss. He defended force as the interactive matrix of nature and insisted on the importance of dynamics. The dynamic ontology of the Living Forces was ridiculed in its day, for Newton’s mechanics had digested Kepler’s celestial dynamics and marginalized Leibniz’s physical dynamics. Yet Kant’s stance would mark out the future course of science. We do not regard nature as a collection of particles and forces in empty space anymore, but instead as a system of energy-pulses interacting in fields. Dynamics has turned out to be fundamental.

When examining the force-space bond in detail (#10), Kant discovered the law of free point source radiation (1:24.19–23), historically the first generalization of the individual inverse-square laws in natural philosophy:

The pressure of any point-source radiation in a free field drops at a rate that is inversely proportional to the square of the propagated distance. [ 14 ]

Kant’s generalization unites Kepler’s law of photo measurement (1604), Newton’s law of universal gravitation (1697), and Coulomb’s later law of electrostatic force (1785) as instantiations of the spread of energy. [ 15 ] Kant’s law governs multiple forms of free radiation, not just light, gravity, and electrostatic force, but also radioactivity, radio waves, and sound. Its most famous application, in its first, Keplerian, instantiation, was Hubble’s measure of the luminosity of distant variable stars (1924)—which led to the discoveries of cosmic expansion and the Big Bang.

In the concluding reflection of the pivotal tenth section of the Living Forces , Kant recognized the contingency of the pressure-propagation ratio (1:24.26–8), inferred that other ratios would generate continua with other dimensions (1:24.28–30), and surmised that a science in command of the dimensional range would be the highest geometry achievable (1:24.31–3). In light of quantum geometry and its modern guises—superstring and M-theories—this last remark might well have been Kant’s most far-sighted prediction. Despite suffering from insufficient scientific training, the rejection by his advisor, the academic failure, and the catastrophe in his family, Kant’s philosophical debut in 1749 reveals the mark of genius.

For the next seven years, Kant’s life would be quiet. He was now teaching children in the Baltic countryside. As a Hofmeister (private teacher), he educated the sons of Pastor Andersch, from 1748 to 1751, in the French settlement Judtschen, half a day’s walk from Königsberg. Next he taught the sons of Knight von Hülsen at his Arnsberg estate until about 1753, a two-day day ride from Königsberg. Finally he worked as a tutor for Count Keyserlingk until 1754. This in Kant’s life is marked by social engagements, dinners and convivial living. During this time Kant’s finances improved, which left him more time to attend to his tutoring and his own research.

When Kant left town, the main influence on his thought had been Georg Bernhard Bilfinger [ 16 ] (1693–1750), Wolff’s former assistant at Halle. Bilfinger’s heuristic method had inspired the project of Living Forces . This rule for finding truth is to identify an intermediate position when experts advance contrary views, provided ulterior motives are absent (1:32.7–13). Bilfinger’s rule had guided Kant to reconcile Leibniz and Descartes over force. This method was to characterize nearly all of his critical writings as well.

In the countryside, Kant realized that his debut had met with no success, despite its inspiration. His middle way of synthesizing Leibniz and Descartes was ignored. Having criticized Newton, Kant now reconsidered his stance on Newtonian physics. When Kant published his second work, the Spin-Cycle essay (1754), his misgivings had turned into admiration. As its title states, it is an

investigation of the question whether the earth in its axial rotation, whereby it causes the change of day and night, has experienced any change since the earliest times of its origin, and how one could answer this question, announced for the current year’s prize, by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. (1:183.1–12)

Kant describes gravitational attraction there as “nature’s universal engine” ( das allgemeine Triebwerk der Natur ), which allowed Newton to reveal the secrets of nature in a manner that is “as clear as it is indubitable” (1:186.35–7). In the essay, he also announces his next book (1755) with the working title,

Cosmogony, or attempt to deduce the origin of the cosmos, the constitution of celestial bodies, and the causes of their motions, from the general laws of motion of matter according to Newton’s theory. (1:191.4–8)

Kant’s Newtonian conversion would be completed while working on the Spin-Cycle essay. The early drafts still involve discussions of Huygens’s dynamics (23:5–7). But published argument is sharpened to a Newtonian point—no other natural philosopher is even mentioned. Newton had become Kant’s authority and his sole scientific point of reference.

Little is known of Kant’s actual conversion. Only start and finish— Living Forces and Spin-Cycle —are present. But it does not take much imagination to fill in the blanks. In 1749, Kant promoted his book and waited for a reaction. When keeping track of the relevant journals, it could not have escaped him that Newton was the winner, nor that Leibnizian dynamics was on the wane and that support for Cartesian kinematics had all but collapsed. Force was Newtonian force. Newtonian physics had become the new paradigm of natural philosophy.

By his own account, Kant was not enthusiastic about his employment, but he did not hate it either. Some of his charges affectionately stayed in touch and later sought him out in the city. He was on good terms with Andersch and Hülsen, and the work for the Keyserlingks was the start of lifelong friendships. So his tutoring responsibilities were not too great a burden. Afterwards, he would churn out publications at breath-taking speed—two tracts, one book, a Master’s thesis, and a dissertation; each of them on a different topic, and all of them in little more than one year (from June 1754 to September 1755). The timing suggests that he had written some of it already in the countryside.

This means he had leisure. He taught, but also pursued his own interests. Remarkable about his Newtonian conversion is not the change of heart, but the change in competence. His first publication, despite its brilliance, reveals his confusions over basic mechanics and a remedial grasp of the mathematics needed to understand Newton. His next group of works displays a firm grasp of celestial mechanics and a growing appreciation of the Principia . Digesting its contents, particularly in the given form (in fluxion instead of normal calculus) could have taken months, if not years.

The context in which Kant found himself may have lent itself to a more holistic engagement with Newton. Rural life is life in daylight. Kant had to adapt to his employers and attended to his charges during the day. Because his leisure would have been after dinner (sundown) or before breakfast (sunrise), he probably read the Principia at night. Nights before the industrial revolution were different than they are now. Nights were dark, and when there was neither clouds nor a full moon, stars would blaze with intensity unfamiliar to us today. The starry skies must have been awe-inspiring. We can conjecture that Kant, studying the Principia , would occasionally step outside and look up. He was reading about celestial mechanics—and then he would see it. Kant’s subsequent publications reveal his exuberance about the stars and the laws they display; just as they reveal his grasp of the planetary dance and his recognition of Newton’s achievement. Kant’s employment in the countryside can certainly be understood as a boon to his study of Newton.

Kant’s earlier work had sensitized him to the dynamics of nature, and this would have made it all the easier to marvel over celestial mechanics while stargazing. Thinkers with a dynamic bent, from Pythagoras to Kepler, listened to the music of the spheres. As Kepler’s Harmonice Mundi (1619) shows, the music of the spheres is not a poetic delusion but a heuristic device. [ 17 ] It turns one’s attention on cosmic patterns, the harmonies and beats that point to laws. As the Spin-Cycle essay illustrates, Kant followed in the footsteps of such thinkers. Listening to the music of the spheres would generate the astonishing discoveries of the 1750s.

On the face of it, it seems inexplicable how Kant could apply Newton’s theory of the tides to the fate of Earth’s axial rotation. But in the Spin-Cycle essay (1754), Kant arrived at the right result for the right reasons. Newton showed that the primarily lunar gravity acts on ocean tides. This action, Kant argues, constitutes a retarding moment on the Earth’s surface (1:187); this retardation, he infers, slows down the Earth’s rotation (1:188); and the lunar brake only lets go, he concludes, when days are as long as lunar months (1:190). He found the solution despite multiple handicaps: minimal data, unimpressive formal skills, and no instruments.

But if the planet’s rotational fate is modeled as music, the solution will be loud and clear. The gravitational pulls beat out different rhythms. Daily terrestrial rotation and monthly lunar revolution are not in sync. The resonance of their two spheres rattles with a noise—drumming a syncopated beat, the lows and highs of oceanic tides. This tidal noise distracts from the rotating rhythm. The tidal taps, every six hours, weaken the Earth’s beat. Syncopates are dissonant; they are mechanical wobbles, and they will eventually cease. Undermining the cosmic beat, the dynamic opposites slow the Earth’s spin down until they dissolve in harmony. When, in the far future the Moon always shines over the same spot, the Earth will have found its rhythm, sans tidal cacophony, and be in sonic step with its celestial neighborhood, and the rotation of the Earth will be slowed. Thus Kant’s astrophysical essay was possible.

In retrospect, Newton had clarified to Kant the force-space bond of the Living Forces . In its new guise, the bond is so useful that its implications go beyond the Earth-Moon system. Its pulse, the pulls and pushes, is the rhythm of the cosmos. The lesson of the Living Forces is that matter is energy, and that forces act and interact with space. Aristotle’s entelechy reveals that an initial dynamic push produces material order when put into action. This action involves Bilfinger’s dialectical harmony of opposites, but it is Newton who reveals its actual and precise mechanics.

Cosmic action turns on gravitation, the reciprocal attraction of masses. When drawn together, masses collide, crash, and are laterally deflected. The angular momentum of deflections generates a counterforce to centripetal gravitation—centrifugal repulsion. Applying Newton to the bond, in his second book Universal Natural History and Theory of the Sky (1755), Kant sees that the dynamics of force, its push and pull, are attraction and repulsion. Matter is then all you need, he says, and you can start building a world (1:229.10–11).

This is far more radical—and more consistent—than Newton’s approach. Gravity will not do the trick of world building. However, the cosmic harmony of dynamic opposites, attraction and repulsion, can do the conceptual work, provided one assumes a random distribution of particles. This proviso marks a step beyond the Living Forces . There, in the first book, Kant had explained space by the outward action of force, but had glossed over the individuation of multiple dynamic presences, necessary for cosmic evolution. Here, in the second book, he assumes an initial material chaos and explains its growth into ordered complexity by the interaction of forces.

Kant’s two cosmological starting points—dynamic stretch into the void in the 1740s, and homogeneous material chaos in the 1750s—are not contradictory. The reflections in his first book begin with the very beginning, with existence prior to extension. The reflections in his second book proceed from the next stage, existence in extension. Kant’s initial cosmogony starts with force stretching out into a void, creating a field. His next theory begins with the extended field sedimenting into a scattering of particles. He does not replace a dynamic by an atomistic theory, or switch from active forces to inert matter. Matter always remains the guise and result of energetic interactions. As he would stress in his professorial thesis, the Physical Monadology (1756), particles are force concentrations, whose solidity is due to dynamic interplay.

In light of present knowledge, his reflections were largely correct, and the gap in his cosmic history—the interval from dynamic extension to material particles—remains subject to debate today. Cosmologists are not unanimous on what happened in this period. Nonetheless, they have substantiated that force came first and that material chaos followed next. The universe did start dynamically as a singularity, whose first outward-bound and energetic action—the Big Bang—wove a dimensional structure in its wake. The continuum (the disentangling of space and time) emerged 10 −51 years and the chaos (the formation of atomic nuclei) 10 −5 years after the Big Bang—followed by the creation of atoms, of stars, the Sun, and the Earth. Within the expanding bubble of the Bang is the universe today.

As soon as material chaos is assumed, everything happens on its own. Kant contends in the Universal Natural History that nature’s flourishing toward well-ordered complexity is explicable through an “essential striving” (1:226.8–12). No Newtonian “hand of God” needs to stave off perceived loss of motion (1:222–225); he had already stated earlier that appealing to lost motion is a “desperate excuse” ( Living Forces #50; 1:59). As he explains now—taking nothing back from the stance that cost him his graduation—God does not function in nature’s development because creation is self-organization. Fully convinced of this, he warns fundamentalists against opposing science; if they did, they would be defeated (1:222.32–35; 225.2–5).

The push and pull of the bond explains cosmic self-organization, and in the Universal Natural History Kant shows how the chaos evolved to the starry skies visible now. It should be possible to do the same for organisms, but science at the time did not explain the formation of life. How life unfolds we do not know (1:230.14–20); we only know that it does. Kant believes (science agrees) that star birth is easier to determine than the creation of life (1:230.20–26).

With his famous nebular hypothesis, Kant discerned how planets, stars, and galaxies form. Their birth is a process of titanic power. Attractive forces contract particles into clouds, but repulsive forces deflect them up close. Continued accretion increases deflection, imparting angular momentum on the ever quicker rotating cloud. Rotation generates centrifugal forces, pulling the cloud’s equators outwards, crushing the poles, until the out-bulging yet in-falling sphere, revolving ever faster around its center, flattens into a disc. The bond, in Newton’s model of universal gravitation, continues coalescing in momentum and spin, until the center of the cosmic disc is so energized that it combusts. Increased energy translates into increased structure, organizing the ecliptic plane into lumpy coalescence. When the disc plane sediments into spinning bands, the lumps grow massive, while caroming along their orbits. The moving masses vacuum their paths and grow into planets strung along an ecliptic plane, orbiting a sun in now empty space—or, on a higher order of magnitude, into suns majestically revolving around a brightly lit galactic center. Whether suns in spiral galaxies, or planets in solar systems, the orbiting satellites sweep out equal areas in equal times, with their periods in sync with their distances from the gravitational centers. [ 18 ]

With this essay, Kant synthesizes Newton with his own theory of forces, leading Kant to the cutting edge of current knowledge. Nature, in the Universal Natural History , streams outward in a wavefront of organization (1:314.1–2), generating worlds (1:314.8), biospheres and sentience (1:317.5–13, 352–3), and finally reason, human and otherwise (1:351–66). Organization is fragile, and spontaneity, pushed far enough, invites chaos. Mature cosmic regions decay, chaos sets in, and entropy follows in the wake of complexity. But entropy provides the very conditions that allow the cosmic pulse to bounce material points back to order. Thus the expanding chaos coalesces at its center into order, followed by chaos, by order, by chaos. Like a rising and burning phoenix, nature cycles between life and death (1:312.13).

For creatures, the cosmic phoenix is a problem. Humans are just feathers on its wings. Humans grow only to burn to ashes; they are not exempt from the cosmic law (1:318.17–18). As the pulsing cosmic vector governs everything, order emerges on all orders of magnitude, from the repetitive birth of the phoenix to the elements to life and to inevitable collapse—only to begin anew again. The force-space bond unfolds in the interactive harmony of dynamic opposites, an interaction governed by Newton’s universal gravitation, churning out galaxies, suns, planets, life, and minds. Thus, as Kant writes, a “single universal rule” guides natural evolution in an absolutely glorious way (1:306.18–23).

When Kant returned to Königsberg in early autumn 1754, his prospects had improved. King Friedrich II (Frederick the Great, reign 1740–86), like Kant a victim of a fundamentalist education, had instituted liberal policies in Prussia that were making themselves felt in the province. Kant’s former advisor Knutzen had died (1751), and a freer atmosphere now pervaded the university. Kant had saved some money, supplemented his formal education with his own studies, and was prepared to return to school. He would now complete his studies and start his academic career.

He dedicated the Universal Natural History to Frederick the Great and published it in spring 1755. With this publication, Kant cautiously published anonymously. The problem was not risking religious opposition by endorsing Newton. Rather, it was that Kant had sharpened celestial mechanics to a secular and dynamic cosmology, while replacing Newton’s Christian view of natural design with a non-anthropocentric and naturalistic teleology. He supported Newtonian mechanics and cosmology, but to the detriment of biblical creation stories.

Newton had thought that cosmic organization required the hand of God, but Kant eliminated any need for divine interference. Newton had supposed that God regularly infuses nature with new motion to keep the world machine from running down due to entropy; he had accepted the notion of final causes as ways in which God makes himself known; and he had appealed to God’s miraculous adjustments whenever physical explanations failed him, as in the case of the ecliptic plane. [ 19 ] Newton could not explain the coplanar orbits of planets and surmised, “such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice” (1979 [1730]: 402).

Kant discovered in the Universal Natural History that the planetary arrangement on the ecliptic plane results from forces acting on particles that accrete in a spinning cloud. Hence there was no need to follow Newton and appeal to God. Nor was there any compelling metaphysical reason to do so. Force is goal-directed and its energy unfolds the cosmos. The term Kant employs for this unfolding, Auswicklung der Natur (1:226.8), is the “out-wrapping” of nature, from primal force to complex structure. “Out-wrapping” is both process and purpose. Purpose is not imposed by a supernatural God, but, instead, woven into the natural fabric. Teleological ends and means are natural in the development of forces, location, space and particles; the interplay of forces is the vehicle of final causes, and the telos of nature is its own fulfillment. (1:223, 263, 332). Even in its simplest state, matter has the urge to develop itself. (1:228, 262–3, 314). The rise of order and abundance—or biological diversity, in our terms—marks nature’s quest toward fulfillment, and this process, fueled by the incessant pulse of attraction and repulsion, generates harmony and beauty.

Following this cosmic model, in which Kant rejects extrinsic teleology for an immanent version, everything is connected. Taking his cue from Pope’s “chain of being”, Kant likens the universe to a Kette der Natur , the “chain of nature” (1: 308, 365). [ 20 ] Humans are merely links in the greater chain of being. Dismissing the anthropocentric teleology of Wolff, Derham, and the physico-theologians, Kant finds the claim that the universe was created for human purposes exaggerated—and provincial. [ 21 ] An intelligent louse, he says, might as well imagine that the scalp it lives on and the forest of hair that surrounds it were created just for the sake of its happiness; from a louse’s point of view, things surely look that way (1:353–4). In the chain of nature, all beings are equal. Nature does not play favorites, none of the organic links, whether it be an insect or a rational being, is more important than another (1:354). As the goal of force is complexity, the goal of nature (commonly understood) is biodiversity, the goal of planets is to sustain biospheres, the goal of terrestrial existence is to increase biota—the telos of nature is life (1:353), at least until it reaches maximum density and begins to fracture in cosmic collapse.

What kind of life? Ultimately, Kant argues, planets aim to sustain intelligent life. Inspired by Fontenelle’s vision of inhabited worlds, he conjectures that there may well be extraterrestrial life. [ 22 ] Nothing, however, guarantees that humans are the crowns of creation nor even atop the chain of being. Humans, Kant conjectures, occupy a “middle rung” on the ladder of creatures (1:359.29)—and are possibly infinitely distant from the top tier of intelligent beings (1:353.35–6). A sober look at ourselves shows that we are on a risky course ( gefährliche Mittelstrasse , 1:366.7) halfway between wisdom and irrationality. We are cosmically mediocre.

A theme of Kant’s thought, dominant in the pre-critical period, integral to the critical period, and to which he returns in old age, is that humans are part of nature. He was too familiar with the philosophy of Descartes and its problems to subscribe to a mind-body dualism of distinct substances, the one thinking, the other extended. Instead he followed Bilfinger’s heuristic, and already in the Living Forces he had solved Descartes’s puzzle of mind-body interaction by arguing that minds are spatially located within their bodies, and that both are energetic structures that influence each other (1:20–21). In the later Prize Essay (1764), he would judge the Christian notion of immaterial souls as indemonstrable (2:293), an argument he re-echoes in his critical writings as well (A339/B397–A405/B432). Although minds are not necessarily matter in a literal sense, he would argue there that they are probably some kind of energy-bundles commensurate with the material framework of nature. Here in the Universal Natural History , he describes humans as material beings; the makeup of rationality is linked to the constitution of matter as a product of dynamic force (1:335).

All things interactively connect, and as minds shape matter, matter shapes minds. Coarse matter makes mental fibers inflexible (1:356). The IQ-constraining coarseness is proportional to density. In cosmic terms, this means that rational force depends on spatial location. In the stellar nebula (the embryonic solar system), matter, consisting of elements with varying density, was randomly distributed. But as soon as an interactive forces pulls the material cloud in and sets it spinning, denser particles will not be as easily pushed around as lighter ones; when unequal bits collide, lighter ones bounce off while denser ones remain on track. Denser elements, deflected later, cruise on lower orbits; lighter elements, deflected sooner, orbit higher up. Orbital height is inversely proportional to material density (1:270); hence orbital bands form denser planets the closer they are to the Sun (1:277; Kant’s “static law”). Kant speculates that really superior intelligence will only emerge in the rarefied matter of outer planets (1:359). The denser a planet is (as Earth, close to the Sun) the denser, unfortunately, are its inhabitants.

The anonymous publication of the Universal Natural History was prudent but not without risk. The dedication indicates Königsberg as the place of composition; the publisher Petersen was a local company, and eventually the identity of the author would have come out. [ 23 ] Petersen went bankrupt just when copies of the Universal Natural History were off the press and in a warehouse. The warehouse was sealed—and then mysteriously burned down, which allowed Petersen to collect insurance and pay off creditors. Bankruptcy and fire prevented the book’s distribution (Rahts 1902: 545–6; Krafft 1971: 193). But this was not necessarily a bad turn for Kant. As the fates of Spinoza, Tschirnhaus, or Toland illustrate, you cannot be a dynamic freethinker and a professor in the conservative university system at the same time. Considering Kant’s goals, the misfortune over the book was a blessing in disguise.

Undaunted, he set out to write his Master’s thesis. According to the ideas articulated so far, Kant envisioned a radiating essence that organizes itself in cosmic expansion. The core stretches out as interactive complexity, emerging in biospheres populated by organisms, while eventually pulling back into itself, like a phoenix of nature, burning up only to rise from the ashes. The cyclic “out-wrapping of nature” generates structures, some of them animated, a few of them intelligent. By their harmonic development, the natural structures will eventually allocate force without lateral boundaries, setting the cosmic vector free. When this is a universal condition, the energy flow is uniform in reiterative patterns across magnitudes. It is then entropic. Overcoming the last boundary, the vertical order of magnitudes, force rushes into itself, concentrating its pulse once more to a singularity before the next cosmic upsurge. [ 24 ]

In order to understand the dynamics of force at the inception of cosmoi, the pulse of the bond, flaring out structure, may be visualized as fire. Fire is an exemplar of the interplay of forces. It is no surprise that the author of Living Forces and Universal Natural History would want to investigate it, for doing so might lead to more insights about the cosmic matrix. He chose Johann Gottfried Teske (1704–72), a professor of physics interested in electricity and lightning, as his advisor and graduated with A Succinct Outline of Some Meditations on Fire .

Hence Kant, who would later soar to the heights of the Critiques and the Categorical Imperative, earned his philosophy degree with a Master’s thesis on the structure of fire (1755).

On Fire is an elaboration of the energetic model of matter. Kant argues there that all bodies, solid, liquid, and gaseous types, consist of dynamic particles or molecules ( moleculae , 1:372.24 and passim). He contends that the particles cohere in an elastic medium. This medium, the ether, permeates the molecular interstices of bodies (prop. 3, 1: 372). He calls this ether “fire-matter” and identifies it as the carrier of warmth and light. Heat results from wave-like vibrations of this materia ignis among the molecules (prop. 8, 1:377). As it is known today, heat is a symptom of molecular vibration, which in turn depends on the energy-state of a body.

After being awarded with Master’s degree, Kant wrote his dissertation, the New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (1755). At first glance, this work has little to do with his previous research on force, cosmos, and fire. It is about the principles of ontology, specifically the conceptual tools for metaphysical investigations. In fact, however, it was only a matter of time until he would write such a work. Now he would explore the cognitive access to dynamic interactivity and the causal structure of human integration into nature. Quite naturally, Kant moved from cosmic origins to nebulae to solar systems to planets and biota, and then to rational life. With his doctoral dissertation, Kant hoped to get to the bottom of the things that interested him most.

Commonsensically understood, humans are parts of nature. Their actions are free, yet natural processes are mechanical and predictable. One pressing question then becomes: How do human actions and natural processes relate? If nature is the out-wrapping of force, and intelligent beings are products of the cosmos, how is their free action possible in a lawful natural matrix? In the New Elucidation , Kant argues for a compatibilist view—both human freedom and natural necessity are real, and neither is reducible to the other. As Kant’s thematic continued to develop, their seeming conflict finds a dynamic resolution. Everything in nature happens for a prior reason (1:396.8–9), and this rule applies to both necessary events and free actions. Both process-types share the fact of causal connectivity, but they connect to causes in different ways (1:400.30–7). Causation types concern the degree of power by which they are influenced, and this is what distinguishes between the two. The opposites, free acts and mechanical events harmonize over force. A free will is not something being pushed around, but is instead a “determining power” ( determinandi potestas ; 1:404.8). By its power, a will can withstand impulses ( motivi ) without being always forced by them (1:404.10–14, 34–9). Those events that do not have sufficient power to withstand force are seen as natural and necessary consequents, those events that possess sufficient ability to withstand forces are seen as free acts. Thus freedom/ spontaneity is naturally possible.

Later, in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant would distinguish between “things” and “persons” (4:428), describing the former as natural means and the latter as rational ends. Persons are free; what distinguishes them is their will, a faculty of determining oneself to action (4:427). Self-determination is the basis of freedom; necessitation is the mark of nature. The New Elucidation supplies the unified ground for this dichotomy. Autonomy and heteronomy are a matter of dynamic degree. Persons and things alike are energetic bundles of collocated forces, but the superior rational force of persons can resist others and is capable of autonomy.

As the title of the New Elucidation of the Principles of Metaphysical Cognition indicates, it is a new attempt to clarify the cognitive principles needed for understanding the structure of reality. The force-space bond in Kant’s first book, as well as the attractive-repulsive interplay in his second, reveal that dynamic interactivity is the generative matrix of nature. Interaction is not “one” thing but involves at least two poles that engage with one another. Because the dynamic “between”—their link—is fundamental, the cognitive tool for capturing the ultimate reality cannot be “one” principle. It cannot even be a basic principle of identity ( a = a ). Interaction is a relation of distinct items that grip one another—if they were not distinct, the event would be an action, not interaction. But it is dynamic interactivity that is the thing in itself.

Hence the New Elucidation does not begin with the principle of identity, like other ontological templates. Kant states that “there is no unique, absolutely first, universal principle of all truths” (prop. 1, 1:388.11–12). Instead, the identity-pair of opposites is absolutely primary ( absolute prima ): “whatever is, is, and whatever is not, is not” (prop. 2, 1:389.3–6). Affirmative and negative identity, when juxtaposed, suggest contradiction. This means that contradiction is a derivative of the primary identity-pair. [ 25 ] It also means that contradiction is governed by a prior ( prae ) identity (prop. 3, 1:390.30–2). Just consider any real knowledge: truth rests on an intuition of its ground ( intuiti niti , 1:394.3–4), and if one wants to go beyond tautological transformations, ground of truth will differ from truth grounded. Analogously, actual states of affairs are grounded in other events (prop. 6, 1:394.10–11). Hence distinct antecedent reasons determine truths; distinct prior grounds determine things. At the same time, the truths determined give meaning to the antecedent as their reason, and the things determined give context to the prior as their ground. Reality emerges as soon as the dynamic center patterns alterity, while being placed and defined by the patterned alterity when doing so. The resulting interaction is essential. And it is accessible. Metaphysical cognition begins with communal identity ( communiter principium identitatis ) governing contradiction (prop. 2, 1:389.3–6).

As the communal identity of opposites is the universal grounded, the ultimate ground must be identity as such. Now the simple unit appears. It is outside our grasp but absolutely necessary (prop. 7, 1:395.4–6). The necessary existing unit is called “God” (ibid.). From it everything follows (prop. 8, 1:396.8–9). Specifically, what follows, and now once more within cognitive reach, is change ( mutatio , 1:410.18). Kant’s Principle of Succession makes change intelligible: change occurs because of substantial connections ([ substantiae ] cum aliis connexae sunt ); the mutual dependency of substances determines mutual alterations (prop. 12, 1:411.18–200). A bond governs change and thus reality. This dynamic-structural bond is a reciprocal, harmonious dependency. Metaphysical cognition ends with reciprocal commercium or interactivity, Kant’s Principle of Coexistence (prop. 13, 1:412–13).

That such a dynamic harmony can exist is so amazing that it has to be divinely sustained (1:413.10–15). Thus the New Elucidation ends with the marvel over interaction. He writes:

… Since we find all things in the universe to be interactively connected … we must admit that this relation depends on a joint cause, on God, the universal principle of beings. …The same pattern of the divine understanding, which generates existence, also establishes the relations of things to each other, by conceiving their existences as correlated with each other. From this it is evident that the universal interaction of all things must be due to this … divine idea. (1:413.13–20)

Kant confidently concludes that his system of universal interaction is certainly ( certe ) better than the pedestrian theory of physical influence. The reason, he explains, is that universal interactivity ( systema universalis substantiarum commercium , 1:415.40) reveals the origin of the connection governing things, an origin that completely escapes ordinary physical influence because this theory looks at substances in isolation (1:416)—ignoring what happens among them, the dynamic “between”.

Kant was on a roll. He turned to writing his professorial thesis or habilitationsschrift , the Physical Monadology (1756). Have established the fundamentality of “the between” for both free events and mechanical causality (and their compatibility), Kant then turns to discuss what the “between” means with regard to the structure of matter—the physical manifestation of forces. Material things are extended—they take up space. The terminal units of nature must be point-entities, for if they weren’t, they would be further divisible and not be the final constituents. Ontology suggests that spatial objects consist of final elements. Logic requires that final elements are indivisible, hence points. Geometry warns that points never fill a volume, regardless how many are used. So how can points make up the spatial things in nature? On the matrix-level, what happens “between” the points?

Building on his earlier works, Kant continues to expound that force is prior to extension; everything comes about through the dynamics of force, pushes and pulls; and even on the smallest scale the attractive-repulsive interplay must structure space ( determinata volumina , 1:484.10–12). Bodies are coherent webs of force-points. The dynamic point-entities are intelligible as mathematical centers, but dynamically, they are centers of active radiation fields that mutually confine each other. Physical monads are thus elementary energy spheres ( sphaera activatis or ambitum activitatis ; 1:481.9–10, 37). They are points and, as such, indivisible—but they radiate and in doing so create extension. Hence non-extended points constitute extended composites. We must think in dynamic terms, because corpuscular interpretations of nature do not work, not even for the ether (1:486.5–35). As he writes at the end of the Physical Monadology , the ether is energetically structured space or “fire matter” ( aether seu materia ignis ; 1:487.18), woven by elastic bonds ( iunctae elasticitates ; 1:487.12).

The professorial thesis has the full title, “the use in natural philosophy of the synthesis of metaphysics and geometry, whose first sample contains the physical monadology”. Kant argues that the combination of metaphysics and geometry can produce good philosophy (1:473). According to him, it seems easier to mate griffins with horses than to join exact science and conjecture (1:473.22–4), but truth is found in pursing just his course, the “physical monadology” is a case in point.

The ultimate units, Kant’s sphaera activatis , are terminal concentrations of energy that stretch out as active dimensional spheres. This insight matches current theoretical physics. In current particle physics, string theory conceives of force-points as closed vibrating loops that whip their exteriors into dimensional shape. Force generates extension—even on the level of elements. From what science can tell today, the resulting dynamic spacelets, so-called Calabi-Yau spaces, are the smallest extension units of reality.

Geometry and conjecture lead to the origin of physical extension. Calabi-Yau spaces, the modern-day correlates to Kant’s spheres, are approximated through quantum geometry. The units, superstrings (the branes of M-theory seen on edge), are smaller than the empirical threshold, the Planck length. Kant contended that the units are beyond the measure of the sensible. Modern cosmologists would agree, both in that investigating the absolutely large, the cosmos, necessarily leads to the investigation of the absolutely small, and in that this path leads from the empirical to the rational. The quest has become formal, and its physical pioneers are mathematicians. Beyond the scope of experiments, the explorers of strings and branes today do conceptual work. And like Kant, they stress the intelligible beauty of nature.

This conceptual work is guided by logical and aesthetic criteria, by elegance and simplicity. By Kant’s own testimony, the contemplation of nature was for him an intensely aesthetic encounter. In the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), his greatest public success before the Critiques , he would develop a phenomenology of beauty. Depending on the intensity of the experience, an aesthetic encounter can be either with beauty, exciting pleasure—or with the sublime, striking awe, sensual overload, even terror (2:208–9). Later, in the Critique of Judgment (1790), he would argue for the heuristic value of aesthetic notions such as design and unity.

When Kant was still working on the Physical Monadology , a tsunami shattered the coastal city Lisbon (1 November 1755). Fires broke out in the chaos that merged into a firestorm incinerating the rubble. It was the worst earthquake recorded up to this point in Western history; 70,000 people died. It struck on Sunday, which happened to be a holiday (All Saints Day, Allerheiligen for Kant). The twelve-meter (40 ft) high waves slammed at the city churches just when the flocks had gathered. The impact destabilized the towers, which collapsed backwards for static reasons, crashing through roofs and crushing whoever prayed below. The brothels, located further up in the hills, were spared. The faithful died, and the sinners survived. This posed a theological challenge.

Kant wrote three papers on the catastrophe. The first, On the Causes of the Terrestrial Convulsions (1756), was an essay on the physical dynamics of earthquakes; Kant speculated that there are giant caves underneath mountain ridges (1:419–20). Sometimes gases in the caves form combustible mixtures. When the gases release, the caves collapse, shaking the earth (1:422). Although Kant’s conjecture is false (quakes are usually due to plate tectonics), it is methodologically beyond reproach, employing known data (mining explosions) to formulate a testable hypothesis. The second tract, History and Natural Description of the Most Curious Occurrences associated with the Quake (1756), is a report on what happened in Lisbon. The third, Further Observation on the Terrestrial Convulsions (1756), is a refutation of superstitious causes such as invidious astrological conjunctions.

In all three essays, Kant insists on secular explanations. Earthquakes are terrible, but they are merely events in nature (1:420). We do not know what they mean in the larger frame of things, and to interpret the Lisbon earthquake as a divine punishment is naïve anthropocentrism.

Kant was interested in earthquakes not only because of the singular event in Portugal, but also for the reason he wrote on winds, the Theory of Winds (1756), and the West-Wind essay (1757). The most dramatic human encounters with natural forces are fire, storms, and earthquakes. Anyone intrigued by force would want to study these phenomena. Fire is pure energy. Earthquakes are the brutal action of force. And winds are the best examples of force moving through space. Meteorological phenomena in particular were an opportunity to apply the hypothesis of the force-space bond, the idea that active, dynamic forces modify each other and that external modifications of a radiation will affect the internal constitution of them. Air masses can be modeled as these fluctuations, and weather involves a clear instantiation of dynamic interactivity.

Kant discovered that the direction-patterns of coastal winds are the result of rhythmic thermal expansions and contractions of air columns over coastal and marine surfaces (1:223–4; 1:492–4). But weather is not only due to the push and pull of energies, the interaction of force (thermal radiation) and space (air columns over surface). As winds are motions in space, other motions may drive them on. Rotational forces—investigated in the earlier Spin-Cycle essay—are especially important. They were Kant’s key for his discoveries, later confirmed, of the dynamic weather cycles responsible for trade winds, equatorial winds, and the monsoon.

After a hiatus of several years, in which high teaching loads permitted him to write only little, Kant turned to what would be the culmination of his systematic cosmology. As the New Elucidation had already shown, the analysis of the interactive natural community points to an absolute and transcendent ground. The contemplation of nature inexorably leads to a reflection over the absolute. Kant examined the perfection of dynamic interactivity and its sustaining divine unit in the Essay on Optimism (1759), arguing that relative natural perfection amounts to the harmony of a manifold with a rule, and that absolute divine perfection is such that its manifold contains within itself the ground of reality (2:30–31note). Their difference, in terms of reality or perfection, is just a matter of degree (2:31.16)—the thrust and limit of the cosmic vector. In 1762, now pushing forty, Kant resumed this line of inquiry and wrote what would be his third book, Only Possible Ground of a Demonstration of God’s Existence (1763). Kant explores there the divine limit of the natural vector. “God” is defined as the necessary, unified, and constant being.

The first part of the Only Possible Ground contains an ontological argument of the divine bond. Instead of regarding existence as a predicate (2:70–4), Kant derives necessary existence from possibility (2:77–84) [ 26 ] The bond governing nature is derivable from its intelligible possibility, and not from any anthropological story nor from the notion of a necessary being. The bond Kant describes is considered divine, but should not be confused with standard anthropological descriptions. One may employ and ontological argument, but one should be clear on just what one is describing as a necessary bond.

The second part contains a teleological argument. Here Kant restates parts of the Universal Natural History (2:93–100, 123–51). Since few copies of that book had survived the publisher’s bankruptcy, he wanted to repeat once more its salient points—while toning down, or omitting altogether, its more provocative insights. Relevant for the topic was the immanent teleology of nature found in the Universal Natural History . In virtue of its own forces acting on matter, nature emerges as a uniform system that evolves to ever increasing order, diversity, and complexity. The divine and active bond is the cosmic vector, and we can observe its design in nature’s evolution. And since the design derives from the “inner possibility” of objects (2:91–2), both conceptual and teleological arguments share the same ground.

The divine bond is the unified and indispensable dynamis . The corresponding traits of cosmic structure—unity and harmony—make Kant’s argument from design possible. The third and final part of the Only Possible Ground contains his assessment of the ontological and teleological arguments. Only the former qualifies, strictly speaking, as a proof (2:161–1). A comparison reveals their differences. The one is a rigorous and conceptual demonstration, while the other is its probabilistic and empirical application. But truth is to be found in their harmony; both are rooted in the same key notion, possibility. Since empirical design is built into the intelligible dynamis of objects, both arguments harmonize over the essence of the bond. This is why the book has its peculiar structure: two arguments ( Beweise ) but one ground ( Beweisgrund ), which is possibility, Kant’s Möglichkeit or Aristotle’s dynamis .

But when Kant was reflecting on the divine ground of nature, he was assailed by doubts. Studying force in nature is one thing, but deducing God’s existence is quite another. Can one identify God in the rigorous and comprehensive way suggested in his third book? Here the ultimate task clashes with ultimate method. Determining the absolute by means of formal demonstration and empirical evidence is too bold. How could Kant be certain that he was not kidding himself?

The preface of the Only Possible Ground reveals his inner torment. Providence, he writes there, already imparted to common sense the notion that God exists, hence the project of a demonstration is redundant (2:65). The insight that God exists does not need “the sophistry of subtle inferences” (ibid.). In theory, such a demonstration might illuminate much else in this object, but “to achieve this purpose, however, one must venture into the bottomless abyss of metaphysics” (2:65.25–66.1). And what is metaphysics? A dark ocean without shore and lighthouse, Kant says, on which it is all too easy to lose one’s way (2:66.1–6).

This is followed by a startling retraction: he writes that his ontological proof, of all things, should not be mistaken for a demonstration (2:66.12–13). But if it were not a demonstration, what else could it be? What he wanted to do, he says, was to supply “just an argument in support of a demonstration”; a construction kit ( Baugerät ) for a future proof (2:66.9–10). This kit has been assembled with “great difficulty” (ibid.), and even so, he owes the reader an apology, for the kit is incomplete—frankly, it is bad ( schlecht ; 2:66.28).

Two years before Kant’s loss of heart, in 1761, the Prussian Academy had announced a question for the public competition of 1763. The question was whether metaphysical principles, specifically the principles of natural theology and morals, could be proven with the same clarity and precision as the truths of geometry. King Frederick II had invited foreign intellectuals and scientists, such as Maupertuis, d’Alembert, La Mettrie, Voltaire, Lagrange, and Euler to the academy, and they had little patience with their speculative German colleagues. Newton’s star kept rising, and the tough-minded foreigners put the metaphysicians in Berlin on the spot. The prize question was the result.

While Kant was writing the Only Possible Ground , he prepared a submission to the contest, the Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals (1764). The treatise is known as the Prize Essay , although Kant only received second prize, behind Mendelssohn. Work on the Prize Essay put Kant in a stressful situation, not only because he had to meet the contest deadline, but also because he forced himself to engage with metaphysics on two levels—in the book, he pursued a first-order question on God’s existence, and in the essay, he examined the second-order question of whether such a pursuit is actually feasible. This forced Kant to question himself and the project of his book.

The Prize Essay was a step toward the issue that would later acquire obsessive importance for Kant, the problem of the possibility of metaphysics as a system of conceptual ( a priori ) judgments that are synthetic—that really generate true knowledge claims, instead of just paraphrasing what is “known” through common sense. But, in contrast to the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Prize Essay contains still a modicum of hope. Its concern was not whether, but how metaphysics can be possible. Asking “how” suggests that metaphysics is feasible, and that the task is only a matter of determining its right method.

As a model of method, the Principia suggested itself. No other work in recent history had had such an impact on knowledge; no other book had revolutionized the understanding of nature as much as Newton’s masterpiece; and no other book contained so many discoveries in such rigorous form. Such rigor, it appeared, was the key to the extraordinary quality of its contents. Kant, who had studied Newton’s insights a decade earlier, now studied his guidelines, spelled out not only in the “Rules of Philosophy” of the Principia but also in the queries of the Opticks . In the final query (1979 [1730]: 404–5), Newton suggests the research strategy of an analysis of wholes into parts, followed by a synthesis of the identified causes into explanatory principles.

Accordingly, Kant’s methodological proposal in the Prize Essay is a case for a conceptual analysis as the starting point of metaphysics. Synthetic reasoning is premature as long as the concepts involved are ambiguous. Eventually metaphysics should turn into a synthetic discipline, but its current limitations require a mandatory analytic phase first (2:290).

This proposal allowed Kant to present himself as a thinker with exacting standards, and his Prize Essay was a reality-check on the overly optimistic winner, Mendelssohn’s Treatise on the Evidence in the Metaphysical Sciences (1764). The Prize Essay was a critique: metaphysics can be salvaged, but only by rebuilding it from scratch.

By drawing this conclusion Kant sawed off the branch he had been sitting on since 1745. Is conceptual philosophical inquiry into reality capable of certainty? Kant’s answer was “not yet”. But conceptual inquiry had been his work to date, from the Living Forces to the Only Possible Ground . Hence everything he had done suddenly appeared to him as terribly premature. Suddenly, Kant was in a crisis.

Things came to a head a year later, in 1765, when he, now forty-one, read the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). In Heavenly Secrets (8 vol., 1749–56), Swedenborg relates his visions of angels, describing their spiritual world in detail. Kant had been intrigued by the hearsay of the clairvoyant’s exploits, but when he read the work, he recognized it as a fraud.

Kant wrote a scathing satire, the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766). In it he denounces Swedenborg as the “arch-spirit-seer of all spirit-seers” (2:354.20), whose works are “fantasies” (2:363.36), “wild figments of the imagination” (2:366.11), “eight tomes of nonsense” (2:360.15), and the results of “hypochondriacal winds” that result in effluence when raging in the guts, and in heavenly visions when raging in the mind (2:348.25–9).

What disturbed Kant was that he saw in the farting mystic a parody of himself (Laywine 1993: 71). The visionary’s world of angels is the reductio of dynamic cosmology—the absurd final consequence of Kant’s own contentions. He had always assumed that reality is radically coherent. Science and metaphysics join hands in its investigation because the cosmos involves an intelligible as well as an empirical side: humans are unqualified parts of nature; mind and body are energetic interacting presences; rationality depends on matter; freedom in nature is just a question of resisting force; and so forth. There is only force, and its product, nature. Kant’s ideas had amounted to a dynamic parallelism of the corporeal and the mental—just like Swedenborg’s philosophy of heaven.

The Dreams of the Spirit-Seer was thus also a self-critique. He wrote Mendelssohn that to preempt mockery by others, he found it wisest to mock himself, which was honest and something he had to do because his mind “is really in conflict on this issue” (10:70.2–5). The problem, he explains, is the presence of the mind in the material world, and that analogies between spiritual and material substances are flights of fancy unhindered by data (10:71–2). With this admission, in the letter on April 8, 1766, before his forty-second birthday, the entire pre-critical project Kant had worked on since he was twenty had come to a crashing halt.

Kant’s first response to this devastating outcome was to overreact. When a position as a professor at Königsberg University was available, he had to write yet another thesis for the application portfolio, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World (1770), the so-called Inaugural Dissertation . Since the problem handed to him by the mystic had been the dynamic unity of a jointly sensible and intelligible reality, the solution must be, according to Kant, their divorce. In the Inaugural Dissertation , he slashed through the Gordian knot by cutting nature into two halves, the mundus intelligibilis of metaphysics and the mundus sensibilis of science.

His second response was more considered and very courageous. He confronted his long-held convictions and examined them on possible flaws, by which meant to determine which of the claims previously advanced hold up and those that do not. This soul-searching amounted to a second-order investigation—not an examination of the conceptual contentions as such, but an examination of their knowability. This turned out to be an intense task that consumed more than a decade of his life, and which resulted in his greatest work, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

Among its findings, which historically changed the face of philosophy, are that traditional metaphysics is over (Aviii–x, Axix–xx, Bxiv–xv), and that proofs for God’s existence are done with (A631–42/B659–70). Discoveries later made in neuroscience confirm Kant’s insights and affirm that perception results from interaction, whereby pathways organize affecting data (B1, A15/B29, A50–51/B74–5, B113, B148–9), and that the subject of organized experience—the synthetic unity of apperception—poses the hard problem of consciousness (B154–9).

At the same time, Kant qualified there his previous split of the sensible from the intelligible; and it was good that he did, because as his early insights illustrate, his dynamic ontology, albeit premature, had always been on the right track. Thus interactivity entered the Critique as a cognitive device for ordering data (the disjunctive relation or community; A70/B95 and A80/B106) and for perceiving spatial objects (the principle of coexistence; A211/B256–A215/B262). The energy field (force stretched out as space) returns there as well, as the only exception to Kant’s critical rule not to talk about the intelligible features of mind-independent nature. But the rule had to be broken, he realized, because the energy-field sustains the interactive experience of spatial things (A211/B257–A213/B260).

Later, there would be even more qualifications of the split, and Kant’s return to his original themes with the Opus Postumum would turn the former divorce of intelligible and sensible into a merely episodic division to be overcome. But by 1781, he had found his way: the continued quest for the big questions, but now tempered by critical caution.

References to Kant’s texts follow the Academy edition ( Gesammelte Schriften , ed. Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Reimer, later DeGruyter, 1910ff.) by volume, page, and, if useful, by line. References to the Critique of Pure Reason are to the first (A) and second (B) editions.

• Adickes, Erich, 1924a, “Kant als Naturwissenschaftler”, Kant-Studien , 29: 70–97.
• –––, 1924b, Kant als Naturforscher , 2 volumes, Berlin: DeGruyter.
• Beck, Lewis White, 1969, Early German Philosophy. Kant and His Predecessors , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Bird, Graham (ed.), 2006, A Companion to Kant , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Böhme, Hartmut and Gernot Böhme, 1983, Das Andere der Vernunft. Zur Entwicklung von Rationalitätsstrukturen am Beipsiel Kant , Frankfurt: Vittorio Klosterman.
• Borowski, Ludwig, 1804, Darstellung des Lebens und Charakters Immanuel Kants , Königsberg: Nicolovius.
• Brady, Emily, 2013, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Coles, Peter (ed.), 2001, The Routledge Companion to the New Cosmology , London: Routledge.
• Edwards, Jeffrey, 2000, Substance, Force, and the Possibility of Knowledge , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Edward, Jeffrey and Martin Schönfeld, 2006, “Kant’s Material Dynamics and the Field View of Physical Reality”, in Schönfeld 2006c: 109–123.
• Geier, Manfred, 2003, Kant’s Welt: eine Biographie , Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.
• Guyer, Paul, 1992, “Introduction: the starry heavens and the moral law” in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Goldman, Avery, 2012, Kant and the Subject of Critique: On the Regulative Role of the Psychological Idea , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Hawking, Stephen, 2003, The Theory of Everything: the Origin and Fate of the Universe , Beverly Hills: New Millennium.
• Hawking, Stephen and Roger Penrose, 1996, The Nature of Space and Time , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Jachmann, Reinhold Bernhard, 1804, Immanuel Kant geschildert in Briefen an einen Freund , Königsberg: Nicolovius.
• Kepler, Johannes, 1937, Gesammelte Werke , 19 vols., M. Caspar (ed.), Munich: C.H. Beck.
• Krafft, Fritz, 1971, “Analogie—Theodizee—Aktualismus. Wissenschaftshistorische Einführung in Kants Kosmogonie”, in F. Krafft (ed.), I. Kant: Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels , Munich: Kindler.
• Kuehn, Manfred, 2001a, Kant: A Biography , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2001b, “Kant’s Teachers in the Exact Sciences” in E. Watkins (ed.), Kant and the Sciences , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lasswitz, Kurd, 1902, “Anmerkungen zu Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte ”, in Kant, Akademie Edition , 1: 521–33.
• Laywine, Alison, 1993, Kant’s Early Metaphysics and the Origins of the Critical Philosophy (NAKS Studies in Philosophy 3), Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.
• Malter, Rudolf, 1992, Kant in Rede und Gespräch , Hamburg: Meiner.
• Newton, Isaac, 1953, Newton’s Philosophy of Nature. Selections from His Writings , H.S. Thayer (ed.), New York: Hafner.
• –––, 1972 [1726], Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The third edition with variant readings A. Koyré and I.B. Cohen (eds.), 2 volumes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1979 [1730], Opticks, or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light , 4 th edition. A. Einstein, E. Whittaker, et al. (eds.), New York: Dover.
• Paulson, Friedrich, 1902, Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine , New York: Scribner’s Sons.
• Pozzo, Ricardo, 1993, “Kant e Weitenkampff”, Rivista di storia della filosofia , 48: 283–322.
• Rahts, Johannes, 1902, “Anmerkungen zur Allgemeinen Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels ”, in Kant, Akademie Edition , 1: 545–558.
• Rockmore, Tom, 2001, “Introduction” in Tom Rockmore (ed.), New Essays on the Precritical Kant , Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
• Robinson, Daniel N., 2012, How is Nature Possible?: Kant’s Project in the First Critique , New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Schönfeld, Martin, 2000, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: the Precritical Project , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2006a, “Kant’s Early Dynamics”, in Bird 2006: 33–46.
• –––, 2006b, “Kant’s Early Cosmology”, in Bird 2006: 47–62.
• ––– (ed.), 2006c, Kant and Confucianism, Special Issue , Journal of Chinese Philosophy , 33(1): 1–157.
• –––, 2012, “Introduction to Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces ” in E. Watkins (ed.), Immanuel Kant: Natural Science (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, forthcoming, “Georg Bernhard Bilfinger”, in H. Klemme and M. Kuehn (eds.), Dictionary of Eighteenth Century German Philosophers , London: Thoemmes.
• Shell, Susan Meld and Richard Velkley (eds.), 2012, Kant’s Observations and Remarks: A Critical Guide , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Thompson, Michael L. (ed), 2013, Imagination in Kant’s Critical Philosophy , Berlin: DeGruyter.
• Waschkies, Hans-Joachim, 1987, Physik und Physikotheologie des jungen Kant , Amsterdam: Gruner.
• Wasianski, E.A. Christoph, 1804, Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren , Königsberg: Nicolovius.
• Watkins, Eric (ed.), 2012, Immanuel Kant: Natural Science (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Weinberg, Steven, 1993, Dreams of a Final Theory , London: Vintage.
• –––, 1999, “A Unified Physics by 2050?” Scientific American Special , 13: 36–43.
• Wheeler, John A., 1990, A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime , New York: Scientific American Library.
• Wood, Allen W., 2005, Kant , Malden, MA: Blackwell.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Kant-Forschungsstelle Mainz .
• Marburg Kant-Archiv .
• North American Kant Society .
• Kant on the Web , maintained by Steve Palmquist.

Aristotle | Aristotle, General Topics: metaphysics | Aristotle, Special Topics: natural philosophy | Daoism | Descartes, René | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: dialectics | Kant, Immanuel | Kant, Immanuel: and Hume on causality | Kant, Immanuel: and Hume on morality | Kant, Immanuel: and Leibniz | Kant, Immanuel: critique of metaphysics | Kant, Immanuel: philosophy of science | Kant, Immanuel: transcendental arguments | Kant, Immanuel: views on space and time | Kepler, Johannes | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm | Mendelssohn, Moses | Newton, Isaac: views on space, time, and motion | space and time: absolute and relational space and motion, post-Newtonian theories | Spinoza, Baruch

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What is philosophy, and why should i study it.

“Philosophy” comes from Greek words meaning “love of wisdom.”  Philosophy uses the tools of logic and reason to analyze the ways in which humans experience the world.  It teaches critical thinking, close reading, clear writing, and logical analysis; it uses these to understand the language we use to describe the world, and our place within it.  Different areas of philosophy are distinguished by the questions they ask.  Do our senses accurately describe reality?  What makes wrong actions wrong?  How should we live?  These are philosophical questions, and philosophy teaches the ways in which we might begin to answer them.

Students who learn philosophy get a great many benefits from doing so.  The tools taught by philosophy are of great use in further education, and in employment.  Despite the seemingly abstract nature of the questions philosophers ask, the tools philosophy teaches tend to be highly sought-after by employers.  Philosophy students learn how to write clearly, and to read closely, with a critical eye; they are taught to spot bad reasoning, and how to avoid it in their writing and in their work.  It is therefore not surprising that philosophy students have historically scored more highly on tests like the LSAT and GRE, on average, than almost any other discipline.  Many of our students combine studying philosophy with studying other disciplines.

The most important reason to study philosophy is that it is of enormous and enduring interest.  All of us have to answer, for ourselves, the questions asked by philosophers.  In this department, students can learn how to ask the questions well, and how we might begin to develop responses.  Philosophy is important, but it is also enormously enjoyable, and our faculty contains many award-winning teachers who make the process of learning about philosophy fun.  Our faculty are committed to a participatory style of teaching, in which students are provided with the tools and the opportunity to develop and express their own philosophical views.  

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What ‘Justice’ Really Means

The word has taken a beating in the past few weeks. But what role does it truly play in our lives?

By Paul Bloomfield

Mr. Bloomfield is a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut.

It’s a staple of common sense that we don’t let judges try their own cases. Yet if we are to gain self-knowledge, we all must do just that: We must judge ourselves to know ourselves. While we typically think of justice as a virtue of social arrangements or political institutions, the United States has recently bore witness to this virtue in its first-person aspect — self-regarding justice — while watching the confirmation hearings of a Supreme Court Justice.

The virtue of justice requires not only that we judge others fairly, but also that we judge ourselves fairly. This is no mean feat. The trouble is that if a person is a poor judge of him or herself, it is hard to imagine that person being a good judge of others. Bias toward the self often leads to bias against others. Justice begins within ourselves.

While justice is important for each of us in our personal lives, it becomes strikingly important when we think of those in positions of power. We need leaders motivated by a love of justice and not merely self-aggrandizement. Leadership without an inner moral compass reliably pointing toward justice inevitably ends in the abuse of power.

Philosophically, all virtues are ideals that we can only approach without fully attaining them. So, we can always aspire to do better. Given this, what role does the virtue of justice play in our personal lives? What role ought it to play?

In fact there are two roles: Justice functions both in our epistemology, or how we form and justify our beliefs, as well as in practical morality, informing our private and public behavior. These ought to be entwined in our lives since we ought not only think in a fair and just manner but also act accordingly.

The apotheosis of justice is the courtroom judge, interpreting the law and ruling on evidence concerning innocence and guilt. Model judges are epistemically just: Their cognitive processes are never biased or unduly swayed, their conclusions are not prejudged, and their verdicts reliably correspond to the facts. Truth is their goal. Not only must there be no thumb on the scale, the evidence must be balanced while wearing a blindfold. The rulings of judges, however, are also undeniably moral, bearing as they do on issues of justice, restitution and the execution of punishment.

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5 5 Modern Moral Philosophy: From Beginning to End?

• Published: December 2009
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This chapter claims that since Kant modern moral philosophy has generally agreed that everyone is equally able to figure out, without aid, what morality requires; that awareness of moral requirements motivates; and that moral requirements override all other requirements. Another claim is that this constellation was new: prior to Kant and later thinkers, these beliefs were not widely accepted. The new view emerged from efforts to show how humans — who are quarrelsome but sociable, can live together — a problem that emerged from the work of Grotius and Hobbes. This problem replaced the ancient question — what is the human good? — as central to moral philosophy. It is suggested that modern moral philosophy, whose beginning is traced here, might also have an end, if new conditions make new issues more important.

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Philosophy As a Way of Life

“Vain is the word of that philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man." 1. Epicurus

Philosophy, as it is practiced today, is abstract, theoretical, and detached from life, just one academic subject among others. In the Greco-Roman world, it was something quite different, argues the French philosopher Pierre Hadot. Philosophy was a way of life. Not merely a subject of study, philosophy was considered an art of living, a practice aimed at relieving suffering and shaping and remaking the self according to an ideal of wisdom; “Such is the lesson of ancient philosophy: an invitation to each human being to transform himself. Philosophy is a conversion, a transformation of one's way of being and living, and a quest for wisdom.” 2. It is the practice of what Hadot calls "spiritual exercises" that brings about self-transformation and makes philosophy a way of life.

The School of Athens (Scuola di Atene) by Raphael

Wikimedia Commons

The Ancient Schools

For the Greeks and Romans, doing philosophy meant choosing a school and adopting their way of life. It involved what today would be called a religious conversion.  “The philosophical school …demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being, and…a…desire to be and live in a certain way.” 3.    Each school had their own set of spiritual exercises that corresponded to their respective ideals of wisdom.    

The exercises the students practiced were those that we still associate with academic study i.e., reading, writing, research, and dialogue.  But they also employed exercises that we identify with religious or spiritual organizations, e.g. exercises in self-control, therapies to calm the passions, self-examination, meditation, and memorization of the principles of the school. 

(It should be noted that Hadot’s picture of ancient philosophy is more accurately a description of philosophy as practiced by Socrates and the Hellenistic schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism rather than the schools of Plato and Aristotle.)           

The Loss of Spiritual Exercises

In 529 AD the Christian Emperor, Justinian, closed the Athenian Academy, a neo-Platonic school, and brought to an end the teaching of classical philosophy in the West.  Now Christianity alone was considered a way of life and philosophy was reduced to being a servant or handmaiden to theology, supplying philosophical language and concepts to defend the dogmas of the church.    

The spiritual exercises of philosophy became part of Christian spirituality. Hadot argues that the exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas à Kempis are but a Christian adoption of these ancient practices.  In place of wisdom, the imitation of Christ became the ideal that shaped spiritual practice.   In the words of Paul “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise… Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified…” 4.           

For Hadot, the poverty of modern philosophy is the consequence of the abandonment of spiritual exercises. With the waning of Christianity and the rise of secularism, there has been a re-emergence of philosophy understood as a way of life. This can be seen in the works of philosophers like Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. 

The practice of spiritual exercises in the West is first seen in Socrates who famously proclaimed that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” When he stood before the Athenian court facing charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, Socrates told the judges: “I have no concern at all for what most people are concerned about: financial affairs, administration of property…political factions. I did not take this path…but [instead]…where I could do the most good to each one of you…by persuading you to be less concerned with what you have than what you are…” 5.  Socrates, a self-described gadfly, kept harassing his fellow citizens to question their beliefs and way of life.  Foucault argues that from this “care of oneself, consecrated by Socrates... [there] evolved …procedures, practices, and formulas…” 6.  

Philosophy As Therapy

“unless the soul is cured, which cannot be done without philosophy, there will be no end to our miseries.” 7. Cicero

The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics all believed the task of philosophy is to treat and relieve suffering.   Philosophy was viewed as analogous to medicine, and the philosopher was seen as the physician of the soul who cured us of false beliefs, irrational fears, and empty desires.

They believed that the passions or emotions were the principal source of our suffering and unhappiness.  That without philosophy, disorder, worries, fears, and unrest rules our soul.     “Philosophy thus appears…as a therapeutic of the passions. Each school had its therapeutic method…linked…to a profound transformation of the individual’s mode of seeing and being.” 8.                                                                               

Stoic Therapy

The Stoics did not seek to control or moderate the passions, rather they sought their elimination.  For them, the good life is a life without passion.  The Stoic sage is apatheia, from the Greek meaning without feeling. 

The Stoic urges us not to give importance to external things.     When we attach ourselves to what is not under our control we set ourselves up for upset and grief.   Love, for instance, brings with it fear of losing it, anger when it is threatened, envy if someone else has it, and grief over its loss. For the Stoics, the passions are the source of all our sorrow.

There is but one thing that is safely under our control, our will to do good or evil.  Everything else is not up to us and is neither good nor bad, but indifferent.  This distinction is the  constant focus of their attention.  The  "Stoic always has ‘at hand’ the fundamental rule of life…the distinction between what depends on us and what does not.” 9.       

The Stoic will not rejoice if he inherits a fortune nor grieve if he loses a loved one.  Health and wealth, as well as poverty and illness, are equally indifferent.  External goods have no effect on whether we are happy or miserable. It is our bad choices that harm us, not what happens in the world. The only thing necessary for happiness is virtue.

Their model is not Achilles, weeping, rolling in the dust, tearing his hair out over the death of his friend, Patroclus.  Rather, they looked to Socratics and how he calmly faced death or to the philosopher, Anaxagoras, who when told that his child had died, remarked, “I was already aware that I had begotten a mortal.” 10.    

Even though the Stoic belief in complete self-sufficiency is obviously false, there is something to be said for a person who is not enslaved to the glitter of the world.  Put in a positive light the Stoic can be described as “a self-commanding person-one who, rather than being the slave of fortune, is truly free just because she doesn’t care for the things that fortune controls.  Commanding herself, she commands all that is important for living well…in a world in which most people value things-such as money...that appear to offer power but really offer slavery…the wise person is the only truly free person.”  11.

Epicurean Therapy

Epicureanism is a philosophy that seeks peace of mind above all else. To achieve that peace requires removing the sources of our unhappiness and unrest.   (Mental pain is seen as far worse than bodily pain.)  Epicurus lays the blame on empty desires and false beliefs.  "The reason people are unhappy is that they are tortured by immense, hollow desires, such as those for wealthy, luxury, and domination." 12   Epicurus calls such desires “hollow” because they know no limit and can never be satisfied.  No amount of money will ever be enough for those who pursue a life of wealth. These desires are not natural but a consequence of false beliefs and a corrupt society.  Natural desires, on the other hand, have limits and are easily satisfied.  Simple food can satisfy our hunger as well as the most expensive delicacies.          

But the greatest source of misery and unhappiness, more than living an empty life, is our fear of death.    The fear of death can be so intense that it can drive a person to suicide.  As Lucretius, a Roman disciple of Epicurus wrote:

“…fear of death

Induces hate of life and light, and men

Are so depressed that they destroy themselves

Having forgotten that this very fear

Was the first cause and source of all their woe.”  13.     

Epicurus argues that the fear of death is a consequence of false beliefs and he is confident that if we follow his arguments we will be persuaded that "death is nothing to us." The Skeptics and Stoics shared Epicurus' belief that our fear of death is mistaken and irrational.  (In contrast, almost all modern philosophers believe that it is rational to fear death.) 

Epicurus main argument is that if death is bad, it has to be bad for somebody.  But death cannot be bad for the living since they are alive, nor for the dead since they don’t exist. There is no subject that exists after death that can experience pleasure or pain or be harmed in any way. Therefore, death means nothing to us. The poet Philip Larkin was not convinced.  “… And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round.” 14.   

Far more convincing is the so called "symmetry argument" used by Lucretius.   He argued that since we do not fear our non-existence before birth we should not fear our non-existence after death.  Or in the vivid language of Seneca: “Would you not think him an utter fool who wept because he was not alive a thousand years ago?  And is he not just as much of a fool who weeps because he will not be alive a thousand years from now?  It is all the same; you will not be, and you were not.”  15.  

From the ancient to the modern world,  Epicurus has been condemned as a hedonist and a subverter of traditional values for identifiying  happiness with pleasure.    He was in fact  an ascetic.  Pleasure, for him, is not sensuality and luxury but freedom from pain and tranquility.   If we live a simple life, restrict our desires, free ourselves from the fear of death, and learn to accept our mortal condition, we can have a tranquil life, and recover the simple joy of existing, with a feeling of profound gratitude for life.  16                                                                      

Spiritual Exercises

All the ancient schools practiced "exercises designed to ensure spiritual progress toward the ideal state of wisdom ...Generally, they consist...of self-control and meditation.  Self-control is fundamentally being attentive to oneself... In all of the schools...philosophy will be especially a meditation upon death and an attentive concentration on the present moment in order to...live in full consciousness,"  17.     PWL, 59

Hadot groups the exercises practiced by the different schools under three headings:  1) concentration on the present, 2) viewing things from above and 3) meditation on death.  The exercise of death was always practiced with the other two exercises.

Attention to the Present Moment     

“…man lives in the world without perceiving the world.” 18. Pierre Hadot 

 We can only be in the present if we free ourselves from the past and the future.  Time has to be experienced in a way entirely different from everyday experience where we flit incessantly between memory and expectation, regret and worry, and in the process lose the present moment.    "For the ancients...the transformation of one's view of the world was intimately linked to exercises which involved concentrating one's mind on the present instant...such exercises consisted in "separating oneself from the future and past," in order to'delimit the present instant." 19.   

Both the Stoics and the Epicureans stressed the importance of being in the present moment. But what this meant in practice for them was very different. For the Stoic being in the present moment demanded constant tension and effort. For the Epicurean being in the present meant learning how to relax and have peace of mind.    “The difference between the two attitudes [are]…the…Epicurean enjoys the present moment, whereas the Stoic wills it intensely; for the one, it is a pleasure; for the other, a duty.” 20.  Though they seem like opposites, Stoicism and Epicureanism, like inhalation and exhalation, complement each other.                                                            

Death & the Present

Most of us live as if we have endless time which is why we give it so little thought and spend it so freely.  Meditating on death can awaken us from our slumber, make us realize our time is brief and each moment precious.   Samuel Johnson’s famous quip is to the point: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." 21.  

The Roman emperor and Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, believed we would be radically changed if we lived as if each day were our last. “The thought of imminent death…transforms our way of acting in a radical way, by forcing us to become aware of the infinite value of each instant: ‘We must accomplish each of life’s actions as if it were the last.” 22.    

 Dostoevsky was confronted by imminent death and was forever changed.   He, along with  fellow members of the Petrashevsky Circle, a literary group, were placed before a firing squad, only to be pardoned at the last minute by the Tsar Nicholas I. This mock execution had been carefully staged by the Tsar. One prisoner went mad, the others permanently scarred.  Dostoevsky’s account appeared twenty years later in his novel, The Idiot.  “But better if I tell you of another man I met last year…this man was led out along with others on to a scaffold and had his sentence of death by shooting read out to him, for political offenses…he says that nothing was more terrible at that moment than the nagging thought: “What if I didn’t have to die!…I would turn every minute into an age, nothing would be wasted, every minute would be accounted for…” 23.                                                                                

View from Above

Homer’s depiction of the Greek gods during the Trojan War calmly looking down from the heavens at the spectacle of the warring Greeks and Trojans may be the source for the spiritual exercise of viewing life from above, from the point of the view of the gods.

This exercise seeks to teach us to view the world and ourselves with detachment and objectivity, from the standpoint of universality.   “The point is…to liberate oneself from one’s individuality, in order to raise oneself up to universality…in becoming aware of oneself as a part of nature, and a portion of universal reason.”  24.       

From the perspective of the universal, our cares and concerns seem trivial and insignificant.  “The view from above changes our value judgments on things: luxury, power, war…and the worries of everyday life become ridiculous.” 25.

Death & the View from Above

“To view things from above is to look at them from the perspective of death....” 26   For Plato,  the philosopher is always trying  to  detach himself, as much as is possible, from  his body and senses.  Its  this spiritual separation  of the soul from the body that is a training for death. “Training for death is training to die to one's individuality and passions, in order to look at things from the perspective of universality and objectivity.” 27.     (Here Plato borrows the Orphic idea that the soul is trapped in the body, that the body is a tomb.)  

The existentialists argue that this flight to the universal is an illusion and a denial of death.  From a universal standpoint, death may seem abstract and unreal but such unconcern vanishes quickly when we face the prospect of our own death.   As Montaigne observed, “When I looked upon death as the end of my life, universally, then I looked upon it with indifference.  Wholesale, I could master it: Retail, it savaged me…” 28.                                         

Meditation on Death

The meditation on death has been put to varied uses.   It was used by all the schools to encourage  concentration on the present moment,  to make us "seize the day." For the Epicureans “meditation on death is intended to make us aware of both the absolute value of existence and the nothingness of death, to give us love of life and to suppress the fear of death.” 29.    Christian monasticism put the mediation  on death to a very different use.  It was practiced not to promote love of life but hatred of it. “The lesson taught by Abbott Evagrius [a Desert Father] to the monks under his charge, that they should think contiqnually of death and the pains of hell…this became the universally accepted teaching throughout the Christian centuries.  One must continually despise the present life, meditate on death as punishment for sin, think of the moment of death as one of extreme importance, and contemplate the tortures of the other world.”  30. 

For Epicurus, the fear of death promoted by religion corrupts the soul and destroys the joy of existence.  Likewise, Montaigne wanted to learn like the ancients to despise death “We are to contemplate death, not, as the Church would insist, that we may fear it, and order our lives accordingly, but that we may become so inured to its presence that we are unaffected by it.” 31.   In short, either despise life or despise death.

Paths to the Universal

The Penitent Magdalen by Georges de La Tour

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

As Hadot grouped spiritual exercises under three headings, so he also reduced them to two directions.  They either are focused on the self or on identifying with what is beyond the self.   There is a  “profound kinship that existed among all these exercises…they ultimately can be reduced to two movements, opposed but complementary…one of concentration of the self, and the other of expansion of the self…[each] striving for a single ideal…the sage [as a universal model]…” 32.

With the exception of Skepticism, the goal of all the ancient philosophical schools was to reach the universal.  The spiritual exercises of “concentrating on the present” and “viewing the world from above” are but different paths to the same end.                                                                                    

Spiritual Exercises & Asceticism

Hadot distinguished spiritual exercises from asceticism. The spiritual exercises practiced by the ancient philosophers were primarily intellectual and imaginative, that is, philosophical thought exercises, while asceticism involves the “complete abstinence or restriction in the use of food, drink, sleep, dress, and property, and especially continence in sexual matters.” 33.     Although there is certainly an ascetic element in all the ancient schools.   

Hadot has been criticized for limiting spiritual exercises to mental exercises.  The bodily exercises as practiced in Hatha Yoga, Zen, and T’ai chi ch’uan could equally be considered spiritual exercises. 

Spiritual Exercises in the Modern World

In most of the philosophical schools the belief in a cosmic order was the backdrop and context in which spiritual exercises were practiced.  The aim of the exercises was to bring the soul into harmony with the order of the universe.    

The Epicureans are the great exception.  For them, there is no universal reason or cosmic order, the world is conceived as a product of chance, and merely one of an infinite number of universes. (In many ways the Epicureans seem like contemporaries.) But “the Epicureans did make use of spiritual exercises…however, these practices are not based on the norms of nature or universal reason.” 34.  

The problem with Hadot’s effort to revive the ancient spiritual exercises is that we no longer inhabit a cosmos.  We no longer believe, as the Stoics and Platonists did, that the universe is infused with reason and is something to imitate and order one’s life by.  We now view the universe as an accident, without purpose or direction, not as a model to imitate.  We look for meaning not in some external, objective order, but within ourselves.

Nonetheless, Hadot was critical of Foucault’s restriction of the ancient spiritual exercises to techniques for shaping the self rather than an effort to reach the universal.  It is “difficult to accept that the philosophical practice of the Stoics and Platonists was nothing but a relationship to one’s self…the feeling of belonging to a whole is an essential element…Such a cosmic perspective transforms the feeling one has of oneself.” 35.       

But Hadot is of two minds. He believes that the practice of spiritual exercises can still be meaningful in the modern age.  You do not need to become a Hindu to practice Hatha Yoga. Still, something has been lost; the “highest point the self can attain is…[where] one has the impression of losing oneself in something that totally overcomes one.” 36.       

For us moderns, the world is neither a creation of God nor divine but purposeless and without meaning.  As the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg lamented, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” 37.     

Nietzsche spins a fable that captures the modern condition.  “In some remote corner of the universe…there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened... only its owner and producer gives it such importance as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world.” 38.   Nietzsche’s vision might be called a disenchanted view from above.   A similiar fable is told by Bertrand Russell in probably his most well known essay, "A Free Man's Worship."  39

Afterword                                                                                                            

The revival of interest in spiritual exercises as a vital part of philosophy is in large part the result of Hadot.  Two of the more important works influenced by Hadot is Martha Nussbaum’s The therapy of desire: theory and practice in Hellenistic ethics and Michel Foucault’s second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality.

For the role of spiritual exercises in Nietzsche see Horst Hutter,  Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices   and Michael Uhr,  Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self Cultivation in the Middle Works

1. Hadot, Pierre, and Arnold I. Davidson. 1995. Philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault . Malden, MA: Blackwell.  110n15, attributed to Epicurus.    

2. Hadot,   Philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault ,  275.

3. Hadot, Pierre. 2002. What is ancient philosophy?  Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 3.

4. Crossway Bibles. 2007.  The Holy Bible: ESV, English Standard Version containing the Old and New Testaments: pew and worship Bible . Wheaton, Ill: Crossway Bibles.  1 Corinthians 1:18-31.

5.   Socrates, Apology 30 a-b, trans.  Hadot, What is ancient philosophy? , 29.

6.  Foucault, Michel. 1986.   The care of the self: Volume 3 of The history of sexuality . New York: Vintage Books, 44, 45      

7.   Cicero, Marcus Tullius, and J. E. King. 1966.  Tusculan disputations . Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, III.13.

8.  Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life , 83.

9.  Ibid.,   Philosophy as a way of life ,  84. 

10.  Nussbaum, Martha Craven. 1994. The therapy of desire: theory and practice in Hellenistic ethics . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 363.

11.  Nussbaum, Martha. “Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism” in Richard Schacht. 1994. Nietzsche, genealogy, morality: essays on Nietzsche's Genealogy of morals . Berkeley: University of California Press, 146.

12.  Hadot, What is ancient philosophy?   117.

13.  The Lucretius Carus, Titus, and Rolfe Humphries. 1968.  The way things are: the De rerum natura of Titus Lucretius Carus . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 69.

14.  Philip Larkin, "Aubade" from  Collected Poems    Larkin, Philip, and Anthony Thwaite. 1989.  Collected poems . New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

15.  Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, and Richard M. Gummere. “On Taking One’s Own Life”   1953.  Ad Lucilium epistulae morales: with an English translation . Cambridge, Mass: Harvard.  Letter 77.  

16.   Sherefkin, Jack.  Immortality and the Fear of Death .   https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/02/04/immortality-fear-death

17.  Hadot,   Philosophy as a way of life ,   PWL, 59.

18.  Ibid., 258. 

19. Ibid.,, 259.  

20. Ibid,  230.    

21.  Boswell, James, C. P. Chadsey, and Gordon Ross. 1946.  The life of Samuel Johnson . Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co. September 19, 1777 . 

22.  Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. 1944.  The meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus 1. 1 . Oxford: Clarendon Press, II, 5, 2. quoted in Hadot, What is ancient philosophy , 137. 

23.    Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky. 2003.  The idiot . New York: Vintage Books, part 1,  chap 5.

24.  Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life , 210-211.

25.   Hadot,  What is ancient philosophy?   207

26.   Hadot,  What is ancient philosophy?   207

27.  Hadot, , What is ancient philosophy   197.

28.  Montaigne, Michel de, and M. A. Screech. 1993.  "On Diversion"  The complete Essays . London, England: Penguin Books, 943.

29.  Hadot,  What is ancient philosophy, 197.

30.  Spencer, Theodore. 1960.  Death and Elizabethan tragedy; a study of convention and opinion in the Elizabethan drama . New York: Pageant Books, 8.

31.   Montaigne, Michel de, and M. A. Screech. 1993.  The complete Essays . London, England: Penguin Books, 60.  ???

32.  Hadot,   What is ancient philosophy?  189.  

33.  Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life , 128.

34.   Ibid., 208

35.   Ibid. 208

36.   Hadot, Pierre, Marc Djaballah, Jeannie Carlier, and Arnold I. Davidson. 2009.  The present alone is our happiness: conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson . Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 84.

37.  Weinberg, Steven. 1993.  T he first three minutes: a modern view of the origin of the universe . New York: Basic Books, 154.

38.  Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Walter Arnold Kaufmann. “From On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” 1976.  The portable Nietzsche . New York: Penguin Books, 42.  

39.   Russell, Bertrand.   "A Free Man's Worship".   http://www.skeptic.ca/Bertrand_Russell_Collection.pdf

Why Is Philosophy Important?

Philosophy is a subject that most people tend to ignore or avoid. However, experts say that philosophy is an essential part of understanding and appreciating the world around us.

So, this leads us to the question, why is philosophy important ? Will it help us with our day-to-day life?

According to experts, here are the top reasons why:

Table of Contents

It illuminates and helps us ponder and create at the boundaries of what we know

It allows us to push the boundaries of what we know, it helps us explore topics with reason and humanity, it put all else into perspective: career, life, moral reasoning, etc, it is crucial in teaching us to debate with civility, it is a fundamental part of being a human, philosophy courses build skills, textbooks are excellent but not always required, promotes critical thinking and reasoning skills, increases ethical awareness and self-reflection, furthers a passion for learning, it can open people to the world of ideas at an early age, you’ll gain valuable insight into human nature, you’ll learn how to understand yourself better, you’ll learn how to be a better person, it will teach you about the things that we can all do and understand, frequently asked questions.

Scott Foulkrod, J.D.

Associate Professor of Philosophy and Legal Studies, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology

Philosophy is important because it illuminates and helps us ponder and create at the boundaries of what we know and what we would like to know or create in science, religion, politics, and many other fields of inquiry and life.

To begin with, it is human nature, what we know and inquires into areas that we explore and can only imagine at the moment.

It starts from a base of accepted knowledge and then expands with a thought, “what if?” Einstein imagined what it would be like to travel on a beam of light.

Many have wondered whether and what God is. Psychology and many other fields that we endeavor to understand as science are ever-changing explorations and explanations of thought.

Philosophy is where reasonable people disagree on a topic, where we live in so many issues such as religion, politics, law, and even scientific inquiry.

It allows us to push the boundaries of what we know into what we would like to learn next or challenge what we think we know.

Some of my former students have told me that our philosophy class was the most important one they took in college because it put all else into perspective with career, life, and moral reasoning about not only can we, but should we, or how should we go about this?

For millennia we have endeavored to solve questions about our existence, the beginning and nature of the universe, the presence and intent of God, who should govern us, and how laws we should live by.

We should use reasoning to decide our actions’ morality, and as important as these questions are, we have not reached any specific agreement.

Philosophy helps us explore these topics with reason and humanity in our attempt to come to solutions we can for a time live with, even while we continue to debate and study them as society changes and boundaries of our technology dissolve.

It is human nature to imagine and explore, and philosophy lives at these boundaries in specific fields such as science and technology .

Former students have told me that our philosophy course was their most important because it put all else into perspective : career, life, moral reasoning, asking not only can we, but should we, and how we should go about doing it.

The value of philosophy today is as crucial as ever in teaching us to debate with civility .

When we leave mere personal passion and use reason, evidence, and empathy, we bring people with us and to us, not to win, but to offer others with our informed hope as we try to create something better for ourselves, our planet, and other species with whom we share it.

Karen Southall Watts

Instructor of Humanities and Success Skills, Bellingham Technical College   | Author,  “ The Solo Workday “

Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Those of us drowning in dirty laundry, unpaid bills, or endless task lists are now collectively rolling our eyes.

Yet, the search for meaning in life is not limited to academics in ivory towers. When given a bit of time and space , we all long to know why we’re here and how we fit in.

Not everyone will get the luxury of taking philosophy classes, but philosophy—the study of the nature of existence—is a fundamental part of being human.

Ask employers what they want in new hires and what job candidates lack.

You will hear some combinations of the following:

• soft skills
• communication skills
• interpersonal skills
• problem-solving skills
• critical thinking skills

Related: Why is Critical Thinking Important?

Philosophy courses, and other humanities-based classes that fall under this broad heading, build these essential skills. Students in these classes learn how to examine the human experience and discuss issues that are sensitive and often complex.

Philosophy and related courses teach us how to think, and having carefully thought about something, how to share those thoughts with others.

People love to gather and talk about life, from early morning coffee groups to book clubs to Death Cafe’s to the comment section on YouTube. Connecting with others and pondering the meaning of our lives is normal, natural, and not limited to formal classroom settings.

Philosophy, and the shared language of philosophical discussion, give us the means to find society in a world that is often overwhelming, chaotic, and cruel.

Philosophical discussion is the arena where we learn to argue with respect, debate with civility, and analyze with care .

Dr. Anneke Schmidt

Educational Researcher | Founder, Skill & Care

There are many reasons why teaching Philosophy in schools can benefit students’ development. Here is a brief list of the main advantages:

The discipline of philosophy provides students with the thought processes necessary to analyze issues, solve problems, and make decisions.

Philosophy can improve students’ reasoning, argumentation, listening, and speaking skills by engaging them in inquiry and debates. Students who study philosophical works develop more vital reasoning skills through class discussion.

Another benefit of teaching philosophy in schools is that it encourages ethical thinking. The study of philosophy helps students develop a sense of right and wrong, enabling them to apply their knowledge of ethics to their everyday lives.

Philosophy is more than just an academic subject. It requires students to reflect on the important moral issues in their lives, examines why these are considered “moral” problems, and understand the consequences of acting upon one’s convictions.

It can also cultivate respect for different cultures and ideas through exposure to different philosophical theories about life and death, happiness, beauty, etc., and challenge one’s preconceived notions about self and society.

One common criticism of teaching philosophy in schools is that the discipline only helps students be eloquent in their verbal expression but fails to teach them any factual knowledge or common sense .

This, however, is a narrow view of what philosophy entails. Philosophy has been known as the “love of wisdom.” It requires systematic and rigorous thinking to understand the complexities of human existence.

The discipline can thus stimulate a passion for lifelong learning and lead students into subjects like history, mathematics, science, or literature.

Getting children involved in philosophy at an early age will help them develop a sense of wonder and instill a love for reading.

It will enable them to ask questions about the things around them that they do not understand, thus encouraging their learning abilities.

Brian Gawor

Vice President of Research, RNL

We’re moving, as a society, away from “stuff.” We’re in an idea and experience economy, and people care more about their purpose and meaning today than the next shiny thing they can buy.

Philosophy opened me to the world of ideas at an early age and has made me more able to connect with people and make a change in every organization I’ve served.

I remember buying a “philosophy for dummies” comic book series my first year in college. And great professors helped me dive into the world of ideas. It changed my life.

I learned about marketing and technology on the job. But because I was introduced to the world of ideas and purpose early , I’ve been better and more resilient as a professional .

In a time of stress, turmoil, and demands from the world, It’s easy to get caught up in the “when” and “how.” Philosophy allows us to focus on the “why,” and that’s crucial to happiness, success, and fulfillment.

Lynda Fairly 

Co-founder,  Numlooker

Philosophy has been around since the very beginning of time, so it’s no surprise that it continues to be a topic of interest.

While many are laughing at the thought of a career in philosophy if they can’t see any practical applications for its study, this field is worth exploring because it can teach you about yourself, love, and even help you understand other people better.

Here are just some of the reasons why it’s an excellent subject to take up and consider as a career option.

Philosophy will teach you the psychology behind why we think, act, and react to the things in life that we do.

It will teach you about human nature, which is essential for understanding others and predicting the actions and reactions of your fellow humans.

Many people mistakenly believe that only other people know how they feel or think, but we experience life much like everyone else when it comes down to it.

If you consider yourself a “soulful person” or a “hard-headed thinker,” philosophy will show you specific ways of learning more about yourself through literature.

Many people know that philosophy can help you become a better person, but it’s the most important aspect of this subject.

Philosophy will teach you about the things that we can all do and understand but don’t because we may not have experienced them first-hand or been taught about them on a deep or meaningful level.

Why is philosophy still important today?

Philosophy helps us to understand the fundamental questions that shape our existence.

Who are we? What is the nature of reality? What is the meaning of life?

These are not just abstract musings for armchair philosophers, but questions that touch the very core of our being. By grappling with these questions, we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.

But philosophy isn’t just about asking big questions — it’s also about developing critical thinking skills. Philosophy teaches us to analyze arguments, identify fallacies, and evaluate evidence. In a world where we are bombarded with information from all sides, these skills are more important than ever. They enable us to separate fact from fiction, to think logically and rationally, and to make informed decisions.

Furthermore, philosophy can help us to navigate ethical dilemmas and moral quandaries. It provides us with frameworks for thinking about what is right and wrong, just and unjust, good and bad. Whether we are considering the ethics of artificial intelligence or the morality of gene editing, philosophy offers us tools to engage with these complex issues in a thoughtful and nuanced way.

Finally, philosophy can inspire us to live better lives. From the ancient Greeks to modern thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, philosophers have explored what it means to live a fulfilling life. By studying their ideas, we can gain insights into how to cultivate happiness, meaning, and purpose in our own lives.

Why is philosophy important in education?

Philosophy is important in education because it provides a framework for understanding the world and our place in it. At its core, philosophy is about asking big questions and seeking answers through rational inquiry.

By incorporating philosophical inquiry into education, we can help students develop critical thinking skills, cultivate a love of learning, and become well-rounded individuals.

One of the key benefits of studying philosophy is that it teaches us to ask questions and seek answers. This is a skill that is essential in all areas of life, from personal relationships to professional endeavors. By encouraging students to ask questions and think critically, we can help them become independent thinkers who are capable of solving problems and making informed decisions.

Another important aspect of philosophy in education is that it provides a foundation for ethical thinking. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that explores questions of right and wrong, and it is essential for students to develop a strong ethical framework in order to navigate the complex moral challenges of the world. By studying ethics, students can learn to think deeply about their values and beliefs, and develop a sense of responsibility to others.

Finally, philosophy is important in education because it teaches us to appreciate the beauty and complexity of the world around us. Philosophy encourages us to explore questions about the nature of reality, the meaning of life, and the relationship between humanity and the universe.

By engaging with these questions, students can gain a deeper understanding of themselves and the world, and develop a sense of wonder and awe about the mysteries of existence.

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The Editors

What is Philosophy: Meaning and Importance Essay

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What Is Philosophy: Introduction

Philosophy definition: socrates, importance of philosophy in life, the value of philosophy, what is philosophy: conclusion, works cited.

Philosophy is the search for knowledge through applying logic and reason. Socrates claimed that such knowledge was obtainable through interaction with the environment. Socrates, particularly, demonstrated that philosophy dealt with exploring subjects, although such exploration seldom created knowledge about the subject.

Plato’s Socratic dialogues convey that philosophy is self-examining, examining other features of existence and acknowledgement of knowledge limits. In the Euthyphro, Plato reveals the nature of philosophy through the dialogues of Socrates as he goes to face the trial against corrupting young men.

Socrates asks Euthryphro whether he understands divine things so much that he can accuse his father of doing wicked things (Plato 3). He goes ahead and dares Euthyphro to define pious to him, in order that he would apply it in his defense. Euthyphro replies to him that pious is seeking for justice.

Socrates seems unsatisfied with this answer and requests him to describe the specific traits of pious actions. Socrates concern is to find out the specific qualities that lead to an action being pious. In response, Euthyphro argues that pious actions are those that make the gods happy (Plato 5).

However, Socrates disputes this definition, noting that the Greek gods were always in conflict. He claims that disputes among the gods resulted from the debates about what was moral or immoral and actions that could please some gods and annoy other gods were both morally right and wrong, as per the definition. This makes Euthyphro to surrender in his efforts of explaining the character of piety to Socrates. He does not offer a concise definition and Plato accomplishes his task of showing that the aspects of piety are unknown.

Socrates also demonstrates the significance of this lack of definite knowledge in the Apology, as he describes qualities of wisdom. While defending himself against not having faith in the gods, Socrates puts forward that he has faith in spirituality, and it is thus ridiculous to claim that he does not believe in gods themselves when he believes in their things (Plato 29). Indeed, Socrates spent his entire life trying to come into terms with the words of the oracle at Delphi, that he was the wisest man.

Since he did not consider himself wise, Socrates lived in pursuit of finding a person who was wiser than he was. Socrates followed artisans, politicians, and others who considered themselves as wise, but after evaluating them, he discovered that they were not wise, although they were knowledgeable.

Socrates described them as skilled men and professionals, but they could not prove their knowledge. This directed Socrates to his philosophical thought that the wisest person is the one who claims to know nothing. By saying so, Socrates meant that we could not claim to know something, unless we can proof our knowledge of what we claim to know.

This makes me to think that all matters have a room for doubt, and it is through justification that human beings get to understand the truth. A good illustration of uncertainty is clear in the Apology, as Socrates explains why he does not feel sorry for his life. He says that fear of death should not influence our choices because we even do not know what death is and we should not fear that which we do not know.

Lastly, Socrates demonstrates the value of philosophy through his answers to those who think that he should stop the practice of examining others and leave Athens.

“…..but can you hold your tongue and then you may go into a foreign city and no one will interfere with you?….and if I say again that daily to discourse virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of man and that the unexamined life is not worth living.” (Plato 39)

Socrates points out that our societies is lacking something so important, because we only concentrate on immediate satisfaction and fail to think about issues deeply. He explains that many people tend to ignore philosophical issues and consider them a waste of time because they tend to focus on providing solutions to questions that cannot have answers. Yet, is it not a contradiction that he poses questions when he thinks that they cannot have answers?

To understand whether an unexamined life is worth living, we must first understand whether life itself is worth living. During happy moments, we all feel that life is worthy living but when demands of this life overpower us, we feel as if life is unworthy. It is in our lowest moments that we also try to test whether our lives are valuable.

At these times, we tend to explore our lives so that we can get the most from it. Therefore, philosophy is valuable, especially for those who choose to think philosophically with an open mind. All we need to do is to select our values and learn the habit of thought and reflection.

In conclusion, I will say that philosophy means different things to different people, but it deals with logic, reflection and questions in search for wisdom.

Plato. Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo . G.M.A. Grube, trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981. Print.

• Divine Command Theory Definition
• Piety and holiness—dialogue of Socrates and Euthyphro
• Socrates’ Dialogue With Euthyphro
• Ethical and Moral Views of Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill
• The Dialog “Crito” by Socrates
• Concept of the Cartesian Dualism in Philosophy
• Arstippus and Epicurus
• Hegel’s Philosophical Theories
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The Evolution of Modern Philosophy

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Why has philosophy evolved in the way that it has? How have its sub-disciplines developed and what impact has this development exerted on the way the subject is now practised? Each volume of The Evolution of Modern Philosophy will focus on a particular sub-discipline of philosophy and examine how it has evolved into the subject as we now understand it. The volumes will be written from the perspective of a current practitioner in contemporary philosophy, whose point of departure will be the question: how did we get from there to here? Cumulatively the series will constitute a library of modern conceptions of philosophy and will reveal how philosophy does not in fact comprise a set of timeless questions but has rather been shaped by broader intellectual and scientific developments to produce particular fields of inquiry addressing particular issues.

• General Editors: Paul Guyer , University of Pennsylvania , Gary Hatfield , University of Pennsylvania

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6 results in The Evolution of Modern Philosophy

The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics

• Making Sense of Things
• A. W. Moore
• Published online: 05 June 2012 Print publication: 12 December 2011
• Get access Buy a print copy Check if you have access via personal or institutional login Log in Register
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• View description This book is concerned with the history of metaphysics since Descartes. Taking as its definition of metaphysics 'the most general attempt to make sense of things', it charts the evolution of this enterprise through various competing conceptions of its possibility, scope, and limits. The book is divided into three parts, dealing respectively with the early modern period, the late modern period in the analytic tradition, and the late modern period in non-analytic traditions. In its unusually wide range, A. W. Moore's study refutes the tired old cliché that there is some unbridgeable gulf between analytic philosophy and philosophy of other kinds. It also advances its own distinctive and compelling conception of what metaphysics is and why it matters. Moore explores how metaphysics can help us to cope with continually changing demands on our humanity by making sense of things in ways that are radically new.

The Evolution of Logic

• Published online: 05 June 2012 Print publication: 23 August 2010
• View description Examines the relations between logic and philosophy over the last 150 years. Logic underwent a major renaissance beginning in the nineteenth century. Cantor almost tamed the infinite, and Frege aimed to undercut Kant by reducing mathematics to logic. These achievements were threatened by the paradoxes, like Russell's. This ferment generated excellent philosophy (and mathematics) by excellent philosophers (and mathematicians) up to World War II. This book provides a selective, critical history of the collaboration between logic and philosophy during this period. After World War II, mathematical logic became a recognized subdiscipline in mathematics departments, and consequently but unfortunately philosophers have lost touch with its monuments. This book aims to make four of them (consistency and independence of the continuum hypothesis, Post's problem, and Morley's theorem) more accessible to philosophers, making available the tools necessary for modern scholars of philosophy to renew a productive dialogue between logic and philosophy.

Linguistic Turns in Modern Philosophy

• Michael Losonsky
• Published online: 05 June 2012 Print publication: 16 January 2006
• View description This book traces the linguistic turns in the history of modern philosophy and the development of the philosophy of language from Locke to Wittgenstein. It examines the contributions of canonical figures such as Leibniz, Mill, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, and Davidson, as well as those of Condillac, Humboldt, Chomsky, and Derrida. Michael Losonsky argues that the philosophy of language begins with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He shows how the history of the philosophy of language in the modern period is marked by a dichotomy between formal and pragmatic perspectives on language and that modern philosophy has not been able to integrate these two aspects of human language. Language as a human activity and language as a syntactic and semantic system remain distinct and competing focal points, although the interplay between these points of view has driven the development of the philosophy of language.

Evidence and Faith

• Philosophy and Religion since the Seventeenth Century
• Charles Taliaferro
• Published online: 15 December 2009 Print publication: 21 February 2005
• View description Charles Taliaferro has written a dynamic narrative history of philosophical reflection on religion from the seventeenth century to the present, with an emphasis on shifting views of faith and the nature of evidence. The book begins with the movement called Cambridge Platonism, which formed a bridge between the ancient and medieval worlds and early modern philosophy. While the book provides a general overview of different movements in philosophy, it also offers a detailed exposition and reflection on key arguments. The scope is broad, from Descartes to contemporary feminist philosophy of religion. Written with clarity and verve, this is a book that will appeal to professionals and students in the philosophy of religion, religious studies, and the history of ideas, as well as informed lay readers.

The Philosophy of Biology

• An Episodic History
• Marjorie Grene , David Depew
• Published online: 05 June 2012 Print publication: 02 August 2004
• View description Is life different from the non-living? If so, how? And how, in that case, does biology as the study of living things differ from other sciences? These questions are traced through an exploration of episodes in the history of biology and philosophy. The book begins with Aristotle, then moves on to Descartes, comparing his position with that of Harvey. In the eighteenth century the authors consider Buffon and Kant. In the nineteenth century the authors examine the Cuvier-Geoffroy debate, pre-Darwinian geology and natural theology, Darwin and the transition from Darwin to the revival of Mendelism. Two chapters deal with the evolutionary synthesis and such questions as the species problem, the reducibility or otherwise of biology to physics and chemistry, and the problem of biological explanation in terms of function and teleology. The final chapters reflect on the implications of the philosophy of biology for philosophy of science in general.

The Philosophy of Physics

• Roberto Torretti
• Published online: 05 June 2012 Print publication: 28 October 1999
• View description A magisterial study of the philosophy of physics that both introduces the subject to the non-specialist and contains many original and important contributions for professionals in the area. Modern physics was born as a part of philosophy and has retained to this day a properly philosophical concern for the clarity and coherence of ideas. Any introduction to the philosophy of physics must therefore focus on the conceptual development of physics itself. This book pursues that development from Galileo and Newton through Maxwell and Boltzmann to Einstein and the founders of quantum mechanics. There is also discussion of important philosophers of physics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and of twentieth-century debates. In the interest of appealing to the broadest possible readership the author avoids technicalities and explains both the physics and philosophical terms.

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Why Plato’s Philosophy is Relevant Today

The role of reason in plato’s philosophy.

Reason plays a central role in Plato’s philosophy, serving as the guiding light for understanding truth and navigating the complexities of the world. For Plato, reason is the tool through which individuals can access higher forms of knowledge and break free from the constraints of mere opinion and perception. By engaging in rigorous intellectual inquiry and critical thinking, individuals can uncover the inherent logic and order that underpins the universe, leading to profound insights and transformative growth.

Furthermore, Plato believed that reason was essential for governing both the individual soul and the broader society. Just as the philosopher-kings in Plato’s ideal city-state were tasked with using reason to lead a just and harmonious society, individuals today can harness the power of reason to address pressing societal issues and foster meaningful change. By cultivating a rational mindset and honing their analytical skills, people can confront challenges with clarity, reason, and wisdom, ultimately paving the way for a more enlightened and equitable world.

Understanding the importance of reason in addressing societal issues today

In Plato’s philosophy, reason plays a crucial role in addressing societal issues both then and now. The ability to think critically, analyze situations objectively, and make decisions based on logic and understanding is essential for navigating the complex challenges we face in the modern world. By emphasizing the importance of reason, Plato teaches us to seek truth and wisdom in our quest for a just and harmonious society.

Today, the need for reason in addressing societal issues is more pressing than ever. From climate change to social inequality, from political polarization to global conflicts, our world is confronted with multifaceted problems that demand rational solutions. By embracing the principles of reason, we can foster meaningful dialogues, make sound policies, and work towards creating a more equitable and sustainable future for all.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Its Relevance Now

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave presents a powerful metaphor that continues to resonate in modern society. The allegory depicts individuals trapped in a cave, only able to see shadows cast on the wall by objects they cannot directly perceive. This serves as a poignant commentary on the importance of critical thinking and questioning the reality presented to us.

In today’s digital age, the allegory of the cave takes on new significance. With the proliferation of social media and online platforms, individuals are constantly bombarded with information and opinions. It becomes increasingly crucial to step back and critically evaluate the content we consume, questioning the validity and biases inherent in the sources. Just as the prisoners in Plato’s cave must break free from their limited perspective to see the truth outside, we are challenged to break free from the echo chambers of our online environments and seek a deeper understanding of the world around us.

Interpreting the allegory of the cave in the context of current media and perception

In today’s society, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave holds a significant relevance when examining the impact of media and perception on individuals. The allegory portrays individuals chained in a cave, observing mere shadows cast by puppets, mistaking them for reality. This notion parallels the modern world where people are bombarded with information through various media channels, sometimes distorting their comprehension of reality. The proliferation of fake news, manipulated images, and biased storytelling can act as the shadows on the cave wall, shaping people’s perceptions of the world around them.

Moreover, just as the prisoners in the allegory initially resist leaving the cave and facing the blinding light of truth, many individuals today might shy away from confronting the uncomfortable truths presented by credible sources. The allure of staying within the comfort of their echo chambers, surrounded by familiar shadows, prevents them from seeking knowledge beyond what aligns with their preconceived beliefs. This phenomenon highlights the importance of critical thinking and media literacy in deciphering between what is authentic and what is merely a projection, encouraging individuals to break free from the chains of misinformation and embrace a more enlightened perspective.

The Legacy of Plato’s Political Philosophy

Plato’s political philosophy, as expounded in his famous work “The Republic,” continues to be a source of inspiration and debate in today’s world. His ideas about the ideal society, governed by philosopher-kings who possess wisdom and a love for truth, have influenced political thought for centuries. The concept of a just society where individuals perform roles according to their abilities and virtue remains a compelling vision that resonates with contemporary discussions on governance and leadership.

Plato’s emphasis on the importance of education and the pursuit of knowledge for the betterment of society also holds relevance in today’s political landscape. His belief that a well-ordered society is one where citizens are guided by reason and not driven by base desires speaks to the need for ethical leadership and civic responsibility in modern governance. While the practicality of Plato’s ideal state may be questioned, his fundamental principles of justice, wisdom, and harmony provide a valuable framework for evaluating and critiquing existing political systems.

Evaluating Plato’s political ideals in light of contemporary political systems

Plato’s political ideals have greatly influenced the development of political systems throughout history. His belief in a hierarchy of rulers, guardians, and workers is reminiscent of certain authoritarian regimes present in contemporary societies. The idea of a philosopher-king, ruling with wisdom and justice, echoes in some modern political figures who claim to have the best interests of their citizens at heart, regardless of the means used to achieve their goals.

However, Plato’s strict hierarchical structure and lack of emphasis on individual freedoms raise concerns when examining his ideals in the context of today’s democratic societies. The concept of a ruling elite making decisions for the greater good can clash with the principles of equality and freedom that form the foundation of many modern political systems. While Plato’s ideas offer valuable insights into governance and leadership, they also highlight the importance of balancing power with accountability and protecting the rights of all individuals within a society.

Related Links

Why Plato’s Ideas Still Matter in the 21st Century What is the Influence of Plato’s Philosophy on Modern Thinkers