- 19th century philosophy
In the
18th century the philosophies ofThe Enlightenment began to have a dramatic effect, the landmark works of philosophers such asImmanuel Kant andJean-Jacques Rousseau influencing a new generation of thinkers. In the late 18th century a movement known asRomanticism sought to combine the formal rationality of the past, with a greater and more immediate emotional and organic sense of the world. Key ideas that sparked this change wereevolution , as postulated byJohann Wolfgang von Goethe ,Erasmus Darwin , andCharles Darwin and what might now be calledemergent order, such as thefree market ofAdam Smith . Pressures foregalitarianism , and more rapid change culminated in a period of revolution and turbulence that would see philosophy change as well.Brief historical outline
With the tumultuous years of 1789-1815, European culture was transformed by revolution, war and disruption. By ending many of the social and cultural props of the previous century, the stage was set for dramatic economic and political change. European philosophy participated in, and drove, many of these changes.
Influences from the late Enlightenment
The last third of the 18th century produced a host of ideas and works which would both systematize previous philosophy, and present a deep challenge to the basis of how philosophy had been systematized.
Immanuel Kant is a name that most would mention as being among the most important of influences, as isJean-Jacques Rousseau . While both of these philosophers were products of the 18th century and its assumptions, they pressed at the boundaries. In trying to explain the nature of the state and government, Rousseau would challenge the basis of government with his declaration that "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains". Kant, while attempting to preserve axiomic skepticism, was forced to argue that we do not see true reality, nor do we speak of it. All we know of reality is appearances. Since all we can see of reality is appearances, Kant postulates the idea of an unknowable. Hegel's distinction between the unknowable and the circumstantially unknown can be seen as the beginnings of Hegel's rational system of the universe. A fairly simple refutation in that for Kant to conceive that there is an unknowable operating behind the appearances is to demonstrate some knowledge of its existence. Quite simply, to know that it exists is to know it.Philosophical schools and tendencies
This is by no means an exhaustive list of all 19th-century philosophy.
German idealism
One of the first philosophers to attempt to grapple with Kant's philosophy was
Johann Gottlieb Fichte , whose development of Kantian metaphysics became a source of inspiration for the Romantics. In "Wissenschaftslehre", Fichte argues that the self posits itself and is a self-producing and changing process.Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling , a student of Fichte, continued to develop many of the same ideas and was also assimilated by the Romantics as something of an official philosopher for their movement. But it was another of Fichte's students, and former roommate of Schelling, who would rise to become the most prominent of the post-Kantian idealists:Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel .Arthur Schopenhauer , rejecting Hegel, called for a return to Kantian idealism.Utilitarianism
In early 19th century Britain,
Jeremy Bentham andJohn Stuart Mill promoted the idea that actions are right as they maximize pleasure and minimize pain. (Bentham believed actions were right as they maximized an individual's pleasure, whereas Mill believed that one's actions were right or wrong depending on whether they maximized pleasure collectively.)Marxism
Karl Marx andFriedrich Engels .Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
Existentialism as a philosophical movement is properly a 20th-century movement, but its major antecedents,Søren Kierkegaard andFriedrich Nietzsche wrote long before the rise of existentialism. In the1840 s, academic philosophy inEurope , following Hegel, was almost completely divorced from the concerns of individual human life, in favour of pursuing abstract metaphysical systems. Kierkegaard sought to reintroduce to philosophy, in the spirit ofSocrates : subjectivity, commitment, faith, and passion, all of which are a part of the human condition.Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche saw the moral values of 19th-century Europe disintegrating into
nihilism (Kierkegaard called it the "levelling" process). Nietzsche attempted to undermine traditional moral values by exposing its foundations. To that end, he distinguished between master and slave moralities, and claimed that man must turn from the meekness and humility of Europe's slave-morality.Both philosophers are precursors to existentialism, among other ideas, for their importance on the "great man" against the age. Kierkegaard wrote of 19th-century Europe, "Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man." [Kierkegaard, Søren. "Concluding Unscientific Postscript"]
Positivism
Auguste Comte , the self-professed founder of modernsociology , put forward the view that the rigorous ordering of confirmable observations alone ought to constitute the realm of human knowledge. He had hoped to order the sciences in increasing degrees of complexity from mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and a new discipline called "sociology", which is the study of the "dynamics and statics of society". [Comte, Auguste. "Course on Positive Philosophy"]Pragmatism (Pragmaticism)
The American philosophers
C.S. Peirce andWilliam James developed the pragmatist philosophy in the late 19th century.British idealism
The twilight years of the 19th-century in Britain saw the rise of
British idealism , a revival of interest in the works of Kant and Hegel.Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism was rooted in
Immanuel Kant 's transcendence andGerman idealism , lead byRalph Waldo Emerson andHenry David Thoreau . The main belief was in an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.References
Further reading
* Baird, Forrest E. "Philosophic Classics: 19th Century Philosophy". ISBN 0130485500
* Gardiner, Patrick. {ed.} "19th-century Philosophy". ISBN 9780029112205
* Shand, John. "Central Works of Philosophy". Vol. 3. The Nineteenth Century. ISBN 9780773530539See also
*
List of philosophers born in the nineteenth century External links
* [http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/fichtejg.htm Fichte from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
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