The Enlightenment: Reason, Science, and Social Change
Background: The Enlightenment
The last third of the eighteenth century heralds a broad movement called the Enlightenment (or Age of Enlightenment) with particular and common characteristics, implemented in various fields of human history. It is used to define a phrase from Kant: Sapere aude! or Have the courage to use your own understanding! Enlightened thinkers relied on reason, a rationalist legacy of thinkers like Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz, but limited by the reason of empiricist
Read MoreNatural Law, Positive Law, and Cartesian Method
Natural Law
It asserts that there is another form of approved iMARS God that is to acquire the habit of choosing at every moment the good action.
Natural Law Defined
- NATURAL LAW
Reason discovers a natural law. Moral norms, therefore, are not the result of convention and customs of each region, but are a reflection of natural law. This is one unwritten law, universal and unchanging, that all humans recognize.
The natural law refers to the purposes for which humans have printed in their nature in the form
Read MoreUnderstanding Human Knowledge: Kant’s Philosophy
The diagram of human knowledge explores the analysis of human cognitive difficulties, including sensitivity, understanding, and reason. It examines the roles of two sources of knowledge and understanding of sensibility:
- Sensitivity: This is passive and merely receives impressions from the outside world.
- Understanding: This is active and occurs spontaneously, forming concepts and drawing from experience.
What is Science?
Science is a set of judgments that can be of different types:
- Analytic / Synthetic
- A
Pre-Socratic Philosophers: Origins of Philosophy
The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece
Philosophy emerged in the 6th century BC in the Greek colony of Miletus, Asia Minor. Miletus was a thriving commercial port, a crossroads for people from various cultures. Several factors contributed to the rise of philosophy in Greece:
- Political Freedom: The Greek city-state (polis) fostered an environment of free thought and debate among its citizens (excluding slaves).
- Philosophical Leisure: The saying “primum vivere, deinde philosophare” (first live,
Nietzsche: Value Transmutation and Nihilism
Transmutation of Values
With the concept of “transmutation of values,” Nietzsche refers to the need to replace traditional values (particularly Christian and bourgeois values) with a new table of values centered on this life and the desire to live fully and intensely. Nietzsche advocates a strong, creative morality based on the affirmation of life, giving supreme value to the affirmation and fulfillment of man, and rejecting moral resentment against the Western tradition. Nietzsche does not intend
Read MoreDescartes and Aristotle: Philosophy Deep Dive
Descartes: Existence of God and the World
Descartes discards the contents and thinking of the present in two dimensions:
- Objective Dimension: Ideas are pictures of things, representing real objects.
- Subjective Dimension: Ideas in themselves cannot be false.
Descartes establishes three kinds of ideas:
- Adventitious Ideas: These come from outside the subject.
- Fictitious Ideas: These are created by the subject, being fabulous and formed by the subject.
- Innate Ideas: These are inherent in the subject but are