From Renaissance to Postmodernism: A History of Philosophical Thought
Contemporary Philosophy
A first phase of optimism and confidence in the forces of man, in his reason and freedom, manifests itself in the philosophy of German Idealism. This provides the ideal reflection of the optimism with which bourgeois society saw their principal values rising: freedom of the French Revolution and the ratio of the Enlightenment. It presents man as an expression in the world of infinite reason. Then, awareness begins to grow regarding the serious problems and injustices of the proletariat. This is reflected in a philosophy of revolution, such as that of Marx, who wanted to end capitalism and establish communism. Alternatively, reformist philosophies emerged, such as the positivism of Comte, proposing to abandon religion and philosophy in favor of scientists and scientific organizations of society. Mill’s utilitarian liberalism fought to achieve happiness for as many people as possible through education and the vote of workers and women. Although it gave an improvement to the economic, social, and political development of the masses, at the end of the century, the thought of Nietzsche appeared, calling into question everything: religion, morality, science, politics.
The twentieth century continued early nineteenth-century trends. In this season, analytical philosophy was established, characterized by its admiration for the natural sciences and its advocacy of empiricism, with its main purpose being the analysis of language. However, the two world wars amounted to a crisis in the minds of Western men. Existentialism attempted to respond to this feeling of living a meaningless life and this great disappointment. Against the totalitarian empires, existentialism protested against the destruction of man, against his depersonalization, and against the forgetfulness of the value of each individual. Faced with this terrible experience, the “Frankfurt School” emerged, a group of German Marxist philosophers who wanted to analyze the bad things that worked to change society and not repeat those disasters. Therefore, it is also called “critical theory.” Habermas is of a different generation but could somehow be regarded as the successor of the leading members of the Frankfurt School. He followed the tenets of critical theory but pointed out the existence of a rational dialogue that invites us to discuss our problems on an equal footing so that agreement on moral standards that we find acceptable to all those affected will become a rational and binding agreement.
In the third part of the twentieth century, our world is characterized by the globalization of the market economy and its recurrent crises, the expansion of new technologies, immigration, multiculturalism, and the proliferation of resistance movements. The philosophy of postmodernism is the answer to this world. It criticizes a uniform and unambiguous world, the arrogance of believing that one can give substance and meaning to everything from reason, the vanity of European ethnocentrism that believed the rest of the world, and the consecration of the great words of modernity.
As for Spanish philosophy, we should say that in the last third of the nineteenth century, it was revitalized by contact with European philosophies, which produced fruit in the early twentieth century. Unamuno and Ortega highlighted those who, from various positions, addressed issues of existence, life, and history. Since the 1960s, there has been another revitalization of Spanish philosophy, opening fully to European currents.
Modern Philosophy
The modern age begins with a time of transition: the Renaissance.
It began in the late fourteenth century in Italy as a movement of renewal and change that spread to Europe, ending the Middle Ages and inaugurating modernity. With it, a new historical stage opened.
The Renaissance movement took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and brought changes that manifested in a new way of understanding the human, humanism, and a new way of studying nature, modern science, which involved the use of a new hypothetical-deductive method. Add the birth of political science. They formed the basis of our present way of looking at the truth.
The term humanist designates a group of authors who focus on an anthropocentric view of reality. Man understands himself as responsible for his own destiny, extolling reason as man’s specific feature that gives autonomy to the authority of the Church and tradition.
At the same time, human beings discovered the objectivity of nature, which can interfere with a theoretical and practical knowledge of its laws, even put at your service. The scientific revolution developed, whose players were Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Scientists are philosophical, whose efforts led to the observation of nature and toward mathematics. His work was enormously influential in the emergence and development of modern science: the design of the universe as an infinite system, the heliocentric theory, and the mechanistic model of physical laws. This is made possible by modern science’s hypothetical-deductive method, provided by Galileo.
This opened the door to finding a single explanation for the whole universe, a task that was fulfilled when Newton applied the principle of universal gravitation.
After this season of hope, a period of crisis and instability occurred. The seventeenth century was a century where solutions were unstable to the problems that hit Europe. Ideologically, this century is characterized by a “spiritual” crisis.
The problem of confidence arises, which requires probing the origin of consciousness. Rationalism, initiated by Descartes and followed by Spinoza and Leibniz, focused their concerns on the issue of knowledge, seeking truth through the use of reason, rejecting the senses and experience as a source of knowledge. Rationalists pose the existence of innate ideas and present mathematics as a science of reference.
Against rationalism emerges British empiricism, whose senior representatives are Locke, Hume, and Berkeley, which states that all our knowledge comes from experience. This is both the origin and the limits of our knowledge. It is a means to all ethical, political, or religious truth.
The Enlightenment emerged in the eighteenth century, whose main proponents were the French philosophers Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and D’Alembert. Scientific breakthroughs produced boundless confidence in human progress.
The ideas of progress, humanity, dignity, freedom, nature, and reason are the new values of the Enlightenment. Human reason is the key concept, and they believed it should not be subjected to any higher authority. Reason is a given, common to all men and all times, to be used at full capacity.