Meaning of Philosophy

The word philosophy comes from the Greek word, philia (love) and sophias (wisdom) and so is
literally defined as “the love of wisdom. This definition was given by Pythagoras.

Philosophy can be defined as the rational enquiry into the essential nature of things, i.e the universe
and man's place in nature. It also probes into our knowledge of things and perception of the world.

It is an attempt to arrive at a rational conception of the reality as a whole. It enquires into the nature
of the universe in which we live, the nature of the human soul, and its destiny, and the nature of God or
the Absolute, and their relation to one another.

It enquires into the nature of matter, time, space, causality, evolution, life, and mind, and their
relation to one another. It is the art of thinking all things logically, systematically, and persistently.

Clarification of concepts is the task of philosophy. Philosophy is the critical analysis of the popular
and scientific concepts, and the discovery of their relations to one another. It is a rational attempt to
integrate our knowledge and interpret and unify our conclusion

Origin or history of philosophy

Like every other human endeavor, philosophy is not without its beginnings and development.
Philosophy started in time and developed with time. philosophy is as old as man in the sense that from
man’s humble beginning he has always asked philosophical questions that demands philosophical
answers. So we can actually say that philosophy has always existed from time immemorial.

Western Philosophy was said to have started in Ancient Greece at around 5th century BC. Some
philosophers came from Ancient Greece, are Plato and Aristotle

The periods or eras in philosophy are:

1. Ancient period (around the 5th century BC)

2. Medieval period (around the 11th – 14th century BC)
3. Renaissance period (around the 15th - 16th century BC)
4. Modern period (around 17th - 20th century BC)
5. Contemporary period (around 20th century till date)

THE MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY PERIOD.

 WHAT CONSTITUTES THE PERIODS

 WHAT GAVE RISE TO THE PERIODS
 WHAT IS PREVALENT TO BOTH PERIODS
 THE PHILOSOPHERS PREVALENT IN BOTH PERIODS.
THE MODERN PHILOSOPHY
The Modern period of philosophy generally corresponds to the 19th and 20th Century.

The Modern period in Philosophy runs roughly from 1600 to 1800. It is defined by the attempt to come
to terms with the intellectual implications of the Scientific Revolution

The Modern period witnessed a big shift from the theo-centric approach (theology and Christian
doctrines) to reality to the anthropo-centric approach(man) . Man himself has become the Center and
the object of thought..

Modern philosophy talks about rationalism and Empiricism

What gave rise to the period

It is not easy to indicate with absolute precision what marks off modern philosophy from its
predecessors, classical, medieval and Renaissance philosophy.

The beginning of modern philosophy is signaled by Descartes’ (1596–1650) fundamental questioning of

all knowledge. Modern philosophy traditionally begins with René Descartes and his dictum “I think,
therefore I am”.

In the early seventeenth century the bulk of philosophy was dominated by Scholasticism, written by
theologians and drawing upon Plato, Aristotle, and early Church writings. Descartes argued that many
predominant Scholastic metaphysical doctrines were meaningless or false. In short, he proposed to
begin philosophy from scratch.

The basic constituents of the modern philosophy: Key hallmarks of “Modern” philosophy are:

1.Focus on issues of knowledge(Empiricism) , skepticism, justification.

2.Rationalism and Reliance on science

3.Individualism.

There are two ages in the modern period,. Namely,

1. The age of reason ( around the 17th century)

2. The age of enlightenment (around the 18th century)

The Age of Reason of the 17th Century and the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th Century (very
roughly speaking), along with the advances in science, the growth of religious tolerance and the
rise of liberalism which went with them, mark the real beginnings of modern philosophy. In
large part, the period can be seen as an ongoing battle between two opposing doctrines,
Rationalism (the belief that all knowledge arises from intellectual and deductive reason, rather
than from the senses) and Empiricism (the belief that the origin of all knowledge is sense
experience, observation and experimentation).
This revolution in philosophical thought was sparked by the French philosopher and
mathematician René Descartes, the first figure in the loose movement known as Rationalism
and much of subsequent Western philosophy can be seen as a response to his ideas. His method
(known as methodological skepticism, although its aim was actually to dispel Skepticism and
arrive at certain knowledge), was to shuck off everything about which there could be even a
suspicion of doubt (including the unreliable senses, even his own body which could be merely an
illusion) to arrive at the single indubitable principle that he possessed consciousness and was
able to think (“I think, therefore I am”). He then argued (that our perception of the world
around us must be created for us by God. He saw the human body as a kind of machine that
follows the mechanical laws of physics, while the mind (or consciousness) was a quite separate
entity, not subject to the laws of physics, which is only able to influence the body and deal with
the outside world by a kind of mysterious two-way interaction. This idea, known as Dualism (or,
more specifically, Cartesian Dualism), set the agenda for philosophical discussion of the “mind-
body problem” for centuries after.
The second great figure of Rationalism was the Dutchman Baruch Spinoza, although his
conception of the world was quite different from that of Descartes. He built up a strikingly
original self-contained metaphysical system in which he rejected Descartes’ Dualism in favor of a
kind of Monism where mind and body were just two different aspects of a single underlying
substance which might be called Nature (and which he also equated with a God of infinitely
many attributes, effectively a kind of Pantheism). Spinoza was a thoroughgoing Determinist who
believed that absolutely everything (even human behavior) occurs through the operation of
necessity, leaving absolutely no room for free will and spontaneity. He also took the Moral
Relativist position that nothing can be in itself either good or bad, except to the extent that it is
subjectively perceived to be so by the individual (and, anyway, in an ordered deterministic
world, the very concepts of Good and Evil can have little or no absolute meaning).
The third great Rationalist was the German Gottfried Leibniz.. According to Leibniz’s theory,
the real world is actually composed of eternal, non-material and mutually-independent
elements he called monads, and the material world that we see and touch is actually just
phenomena (appearances or by-products of the underlying real world). The apparent harmony
prevailing among monads arises because of the will of God (the supreme monad) who arranges
everything in the world in a deterministic manner. He is also considered perhaps the most
important logician between Aristotle and the mid-19th Century developments in modern formal
Logic.
Another important 17th Century French Rationalist (although perhaps of the second order)
was Nicolas Malebranche, who was a follower of Descartes in that he believed that humans
attain knowledge through ideas or immaterial representations in the mind. However,
Malebranche argued (more or less following St. Augustine) that all ideas actually exist only in
God, and that God was the only active power. Thus, he believed that what appears to be
“interaction” between body and mind is actually caused by God, but in such a way that similar
movements in the body will “occasion” similar ideas in the mind, an idea he called
Occasionalism.

In opposition to the Rationalism movement was the equally loose movement of British
Empiricism, which was also represented by three main proponents:

The first of the British Empiricists was John Locke. He argued that all of our ideas, whether
simple or complex, are ultimately derived from experience, so that the knowledge of which we
 are capable is therefore severely limited both in its scope and in its certainty especially given
that the real inner natures of things derive from what he called their primary qualities which we
can never experience and so never know. Locke, lbelieved that the mind was a tabula rasa (or
blank slate) and that people are born without innate ideas, although he did believe that humans
have absolute natural rights which are inherent in the nature of Ethics. Along with Hobbes and
Rousseau, he was one of the originators of Contractarianism (or Social Contract Theory), which
formed the theoretical underpinning for democracy, republicanism, Liberalism and
Libertarianism,
The next of the British Empiricists, was Bishop George Berkeley, although his Empiricism
was of a much more radical kind, mixed with a twist of Idealism. He believed that underlying
reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas, and that individuals can only directly know
these ideas or perceptions (although not the objects themselves) through experience. Thus,
according to Berkeley’s theory, an object only really exists if someone is there to see or sense it
(“to be is to be perceived”), although, he added, the infinite mind of God perceives everything
all the time, and so in this respect the objects continue to exist.
The third, and perhaps greatest, of the British Empiricists was David Hume. He believed
strongly that human experience is as close are we are ever going to get to the truth, and that
experience and observation must be the foundations of any logical argument. Hume argued
that, although we may form beliefs and make inductive inferences about things outside our
experience (by means of instinct, imagination and custom), they cannot be conclusively
established by reason and we should not make any claims to certain knowledge about them
Although, he never openly declared himself an atheist, he found the idea of a God effectively
nonsensical, given that there is no way of arriving at the idea through sensory data. He attacked
many of the basic assumptions of religion, and gave many of the classic criticisms of some of the
arguments for the existence of God (particularly the teleological argument). In his Political
Philosophy, Hume stressed the importance of moderation, and his work contains elements of
both Conservatism and Liberalism.
Towards the end of the Age of Enlightenment, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant
caused another paradigm shift as important as that of Descartes 150 years earlier, and in many
ways this marks the shift to Modern philosophy. He sought to move philosophy beyond the
debate between Rationalism and Empiricism, and he attempted to combine those two
apparently contradictory doctrines into one overarching system. A whole movement
(Kantianism) developed in the wake of his work, and most of the subsequent history of
philosophy can be seen as responses, in one way or another, to his ideas.
Kant showed that Empiricism and Rationalism could be combined and that statements were
possible that were both synthetic (a posteriori knowledge from experience alone, as in
Empiricism) but also a priori (from reason alone, as in Rationalism). Thus, without the senses we
could not become aware of any object, but without understanding and reason we could not
form any conception of it. However, our senses can only tell us about the appearance of a thing
(phenomenon) and not the “thing-in-itself” which Kant believed was essentially unknowable,
although we have certain innate predispositions as to what exists (Transcendental Idealism).

Modern philosophers
 Rationalists
 Rene Descartes
 Baruch Spinoza
 Gottfried Leibniz
Empiricists
 John Locke
 Bishop George Berkley
 David Hume
Political philosophers
 Thomas Hobbes
 Jean Jacques Rousseau
Kantism/German Idealists
 Immanuel kant
 John Goltlieb Fitche

Contemporary philosophy

Contemporary philosophy is the present period in the history of Western philosophy beginning at the
early 20th century with the increasing professionalization of the discipline and the rise of analytic and
continental philosophy

Since the mid-20th century, however, most well-known philosophers have been associated with
academia. Philosophers more and more employ a technical vocabulary and deal with specialized
problems, and they write not for a broad intellectual public but for one another. Professionalism also
has sharpened the divisions between philosophical schools and made the questions of what philosophy
is and what it ought to be matters of the sharpest controversy. Philosophy has become extremely self-
conscious about its own method and nature.

Contemporary philosophy is the most recent stage of what is known as Western philosophy, which
starts in the pre-Socratic period, and advances through its ancient, medieval, Renaissance, etc. stages.

The peculiarities or basic constituents of the contemporary era of philosophy

Contemporary philosophy is often described as divided into two branches : continental and analytic.

Generally speaking, analytic philosophy and continental philosophy describe two different approaches
to doing philosophy. Analytic philosophy is a more traditional form, based on formal logic, while
continental philosophy incorporated a less logic-bound style that interacted with current political
concerns.

Analytic philosophy was founded by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein and took
root in English-speaking universities in Britain and America in the early 20 th century. The analytic style
also draws on the old grand tradition of philosophy, as embodied by figures like Aristotle, Descartes, and
Kant.

Analytic philosophy focuses on clarity and precision in its arguments and is based in the principles of
formal logic, the systematic study of arguments that turns arguments into mathematical equations. A
classic formal logic argument is something like this: ‘All men are mortal. Tunde is a man. Therefore,
Tunde is mortal.’

Because of their focus on logical, mathematical precision, analytic philosophers have found they have
a lot in common with researchers in science and mathematics. Today, many analytic philosophers work
in collaboration with researchers in a wide variety of scientific fields. However, at the same time,
analytic philosophy is criticized for its academic insularity and lack of application to the real world

Continental philosophy: George Wilhelm freidrich Hegel is generally considered to be the father of
continental philosophy, and it includes other important figures like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx,
Kierkegaard, and Foucault. It encompasses philosophical movements including Marxism, existentialism,
structuralism, post-structuralism, and critical theory.

To the extent that the continental philosophies can be described as having common principles, it
includes a style that’s less precise and logical and more literary than analytic philosophy. Many
continental movements are also focused on current social and political conditions, attempting to engage
with the ‘real world’, whereas analytic philosophy deals with the abstract world.

Contemporary philosophy focuses on epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, the

philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, political philosophy, the history of debates in these
areas, and philosophical examination of the assumptions, methods and claims of other areas of focus in
science and social science.

The characteristics of contemporary period

1.Professionalization of philosophy : One of the main characteristics of the
contemporary stage was the conception of a legal and formal body around the
philosophical practice that allowed to recognize all those who fulfilled certain
academic or other statutes. Thinkers the likes of Hegel They were among the first
to be awarded as professors of philosophy in European higher education at the
time.
2. Rejection of the transcendent and the spiritual: Unlike previous stages in the
history of philosophy, the contemporary period is notable for presenting a body
of work that relegated to the background, or rejected entirely, the conceptions
around the transcendental beliefs, religious or spiritual, taking their reflections to
a strictly earthly plane.
3. Reason crisis : It was based on contemporary concerns and questions about
whether philosophy as a reflective practice in the continuous search for
knowledge can really be considered capable of providing an entirely rational
description of reality, without being subject to the subjectivities of those authors
responsible for thinking and developing such visions of reality.
4.Currents and authors: The contemporary western philosophy is divided into
two main approaches, which are :
 Analytical approach, under which we have,
 Naturalism
 Experimental philosophy
 Quietism
Continental approach, under which we have,
 Existentialism
 Structuralism /post structuralism
 Phenomenology
 Critical theory

Contemporary philosophers
 Gottlob Frege
 Bertrand Russell
 Jacques Lacan
 George Willhelm

Conclusion
The attempt of this essay is to extensively describe the modern and contemporary
eras of philosophy. Justice has, to some extent been done to it.
Modern philosophy deals with the debate between Rationalism and Empiricism
and how it can be merged together, while contemporary philosophy talks about
the professionalism and modern approaches to philosophy.

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