Modern Philosophy

Modern philosophy

As with many periodizations, there are multiple current usages for the term 
"Modern Philosophy" that exist in practice. One usage is to date modern 
philosophy from the "Age of Reason", where systematic philosophy became 
common, which excludes Erasmus and Machiavelli as, "modern philosophers". 
Another is to date it, the way the entire larger modern period is dated, 
from the Renaissance. In some usages, "Modern Philosophy" ended in 1800, 
with the rise of Hegelianism and Idealism. There is also the 
lumpers/splitters problem, namely that some works split philosophy into 
more periods than others: one author might feel a strong need to differentiate 
between "The Age of Reason" or "Early Modern Philosophers" and "The 
Enlightenment", another author might write from the perspective that 
1600-1800 is essentially one continuous evolution, and therefore a single 
period. Wikipedia's philosophy section therefore hews more closely to 
centuries as a means of avoiding long discussions over periods, but it 
is important to note the variety of practice that occurs.

A broad overview would then have Erasmus, Francis Bacon, Niccolo Machiavelli, 
and Galileo Galilei represent the rise of empiricism and humanism in place 
of scholastic tradition. 17th-century philosophy is dominated by the need 
to organize philosophy on rational, skeptical, logical and axiomatic 
grounds, such as the work of René Descartes, Blaise Pascal and Thomas 
Hobbes, attempting to integrate religious belief into philosophical frameworks, 
and, often to combat atheism or other unbelief, by adopting the idea of 
material reality, and the dualism between spirit and material. The extension, 
and reaction, against this would be the monism of George Berkeley and 
Benedict de Spinoza.

The 18th-century philosophy article deals with the period often called the 
early part of "The Enlightenment" in the shorter form of the word, and 
centers around the rise of systematic empiricism, following after Sir Isaac 
Newton's natural philosophy. Thus Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau and culminating 
with Kant and the political philosophy of the American Revolution are part 
of The Enlightenment.

The 19th century took the radical notions of self-organization and intrinsic 
order from Goethe and Kantian metaphysics, and proceded to produce a long 
elaboration on the tension between systematization and organic development. 
Foremost was the work of Hegel, whose Logic and Phenomenology of Spirit 
produced a "dialectical" framework for ordering of knowledge. The 19th 
century would also include Schopenhauer's negation of the will. As with 
the 18th century, it would be developments in science that would arise 
from, and then challenge, philosophy: most importantly the work of Charles 
Darwin, which was based on the idea of organic self-regulation found in 
philosophers such as Adam Smith, but fundamentally challenged established 
conceptions.

The 20th Century deals with the upheavals produced by a series of conflicts 
within philosophical discourse over the basis of knowledge, with classical 
certainties overthrown, and new social, economic, scientific and logical 
problems. 20th Century philosophy was set for a series of attempts to 
reform and preserve, and to alter or abolish, older knowledge systems. 
Seminal figures include Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietszche, Ernst Mach, 
John Dewey. Epistemology and its basis was a central concern, as seen 
from the work of Heidegger, Karl Popper, Claude Levi-Strauss and Bertrand 
Russell. Phenomenologically oriented metaphysics undergirded 
existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre, Soren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus) and 
finally postmodern_philosophy (Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, 
Jacques Derrida). Also notable was the rise of "pop" philosophers who 
promulgated systems for dealing with the world, but which were isolated 
philosophically, including Ayn Rand, CS Lewis and others. 

Bibliography

Introductions and anthologies

    * Classics of Western Philosophy by Steven M. Cahn Available from Amazon.com
    * Philosophic Classics: From Plato to Derrida (4th Edition) by Forrest E. Baird Available from Amazon.com
    * The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers by Will Durant Available from Amazon.com
    * From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest by T. Z. Lavine Available from Amazon.com
    * Basic Teachings of the Great Philosophers by S. E. Frost Available from Amazon.com
    * The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell Available from Amazon.com 
    * The Great Philosophers (4 vols.) by Karl Jaspers Available from Amazon.com
    * A History of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century by Christian Delacampagne Available from Amazon.com


Reference

    * A History of Western Philosophy (5 vols.) by W. T. Jones Available from Amazon.com
    * History of Philosophy (9 vols.) by Frederick Copleston Available from Amazon.com
    * History of Philosophy Quarterly (magazine) Available from Amazon.com