The modern subject is the subject of the sciences.
Kant
Marco historical, socio-cultural and philosophical at the time:
Enlightenment is the period from the English Revolution (1688) and the French Revolution (1789).
Kant’s life passes, almost entirely, in Prussia, where four kings govern:
– Frederick William I, which makes the nation in a state Prussian militaristic and bureaucratic.
– Frederick II, King enlightened despotism model.
– Frederick William II, who faces Kant, censoring his work Religion within the bounds of reason, considered as an attack on Christianity.
– Frederick William III
Throughout the eighteenth century there is a process called Old Regime against characterized by the absolute monarchy and a class society. Domina at this time the Enlightened absolutism: the kings are omnipotent lords of the nation is exercised unchecked power with the slogan everything for the people, but without the people.
Faced with the arbitrariness of absolute power struggle emerges starring the bourgeois class, which gets to overthrow that regime in the French Revolution.
Most of the feudal social structure remained. Preponderance Acquires the bourgeoisie, who is the protagonist of social change.
At this time there is U.S. Independence and the industrial revolution with the discovery of the steam engine by James Watt.
All this leads to the abolition of the feudal system and the growing awareness of the dignity of the person.
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Enlightenment is the cultural movement that arose as an attempt to enlighten all mankind through thought and ideas, beyond the religious and political tutelage that prevent men from being more aware and more free. The Enlightenment seeks autonomous reason: that all men leaving the minority to rely solely on reason and use it independently.
Characterized by:
– Faith in the power of human reason.
– Confidence in unlimited progress of mankind.
– Deism, which views the existence of a supreme being, but without going into estimates of their reality.
– The educational ideal. Ignorance is considered the cause of the greatest evils of mankind.
The Enlightenment has its origins in England, in France and ends in Germany.
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In this century philosophical predominate four constraints:
– Nature: Man’s mission is to understand the natural laws and order society according to them.
– Reason: It is the tool that man has to know the laws of nature. If the man goes into the rational, safe walking towards progress.
– Religion: Deism is advocated consequence of rationalism. Religion is sort of a God who leads a virtuous life, which rewards and punishes in the afterlife. It advocates a secular morality, independent of religion.
– Freedom: The struggle for freedom is manifested in the economic field, by economic liberalism.
Received and subsequent impact Influences:
Kant is the great synthesizer of rationalist and empiricist currents.
– From Kant’s rationalism draws the following conviction: Every science is based on a previous content to experience (a priori)
, which called transcendental.
– From empiricism, Kant brings out the following: Every science must be based on data from experience (a posteriori)
, which are empirical and particular conditions of each subject.
Newton and also the whole scientific movement of the eighteenth century Kant influences. Kant intends to translate the conditions for philosophy and metaphysics have the rigor of a science.
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The impact of Kant’s work are vast. Kant derives the idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. In his work appear raIces pre-Marxist socialism of the nineteenth century, when denouncing the exploitation of man by man, and when exposed as ethical standard neck should treat the other as a means but as an end in itself. From Kant, God and the soul will be analyzed and studied by theology and psychology, not philosophy. His work is also a definitive achievement for science: space and time are the condition of possibility of our knowledge, and this will influence the positivism of Comte, in the neo-positivism of the Vienna Circle and Popper. The theory that the subject constructs reality affect the thesis of Heisenberg (uncertainty principle).