Intellectual History Review. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

Intellectual History Review

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

• "Que sais-je?" (What do I know?)– Nothing

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)

Heliocentric

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

Elliptical Orbits

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

From Science to Philosophy

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

René Descartes (1596-1650)

Baconian Thought

• The Advancement of Learning (1605)

• Novum Organum (1620)

• Anti-scholasticism– Empiricism– Inductive reasoning

• Start with a question, end with a certainty

Cartesian Thought

• Discourse on Method (1637)

• Systematic doubt– “Cogito ergo sum”

• Deductive reasoning

• Rationalism

Modern Application

Baconian empiricism and induction

+ Cartesian rationalism and deduction

= The modern scientific method

The Philosophes

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

John Locke (1632-1704)

Voltaire (1694-1778)

• Toleration• Critical of organized

religion– “Ecracsez l’infame”– Believed in Deism

• “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Denis Diderot (1713-1784)

Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794)

On Crimes and Punishments (1764)

The Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)

The Spirit of the Laws (1748)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

• The Social Contract (1762)

The Physiocrats

• Francois Quesnay (1694-1774)

• Pierre Dupont de Nemours (1739-1817)

• Anti-mercantilism

• Anti-regulation

• Concerned with agriculture

• Government’s role: protect property and enforce laws

Radical Philosophes

• Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789)

• David Hume (1711-1776)

19th Century Intellectual Developments

August Comte (1798-1857)

• Positivism1. The Will of God2. The Will of Nature 3. The rule of unchanging law

(positive age)• There are rules for social

behavior that man can understand

• The social sciences– Sociology

Darwin and Evolution

• Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875)– Geological change was

slow, not due to catastrophes

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)

• All forms of life rose through continual adjustment

• His ideas were flawed—he believed children inherited characteristics of their parents

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

The Voyage of the HMS Beagle1831-1836

Galapagos Islands

The Origin of the Species (1859)

Archbishop Wilberforce

T.H. Huxley “Darwin’s Bulldog”

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and Social Darwinism

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

• “God is Dead”• Superman

(Übermensch)• The “Will to Power”

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

• The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

• Sexual Drives• Childhood Experiences• The Unconscious• Id, Ego, and Superego• Repression

– Oedipus Complex– Defense Mechanisms

• Psychoanalysis

• Stages – Oral– Anal– Phallic – Latent

The “New Science”

• Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907)

Michael Faraday (1791-1867)

• Explored electromagnetism – Led to the development of the generator, the

telegraph, the electric motor, streetcars, and the electric light

Other Scientific Advancements

• Max Planck (1858-1947)– Quantum mechanics

• Niels Bohr (1885-1962)– Atomic structure

• Antoine Henri Becquerel and Pierre and Marie Curie– Radioactivity

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

• Background• Atheist existentialism• “Bad Faith”

Main themes of existentialism

1. Existence precedes essence – man is a conscious being, not a thing that is

manipulated or predetermined

2. Anxiety / Anguish

• The dread of the nothingness of human existence

3. Absurdity

• I am my own existence, but my existence is absurd

4. The Void

• There is nothing at all that structures the world in which we live

5. Death

• Death is the most personal and authentic moment…but it is as absurd as birth

6. Alienation

• Apart from our own conscious being, all else is “otherness,” and we are alienated from that otherness