The outlook of the new time is brief. R

new time, which began in the 17th century, became the era of assertion and gradual victory in Western Europe capitalism as a new mode of production, an era of rapid development of science and technology. Under the influence of such exact sciences as mechanics and mathematics, mechanism was established in philosophy. Within the framework of this type of worldview, nature was considered as a huge mechanism, and man as an enterprising and active worker.

The main theme of the philosophy of modern times was the theme knowledge. There are two major currents: empiricism and rationalism interpreting the sources and nature of human knowledge in different ways.
Supporters empiricism(Bacon, Hobbes, Locke) argued that the main source of reliable knowledge about the world is human sensations and experience. This position is most detailed in the work of Bacon. Bacon was a supporter of empirical methods of knowledge (observation, experiment). He considered philosophy an experimental science based on observation, and its subject should be the world including the person himself. Supporters of empiricism urged to rely in everything on the data of experience, human practice.

Supporters rationalism believed that the main source of reliable knowledge is knowledge (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz). The founder of rationalism is Descartes - the author of the expression "question everything." He believed that in everything one should rely not on faith, but on reliable conclusions, and nothing should be taken as the final truth.

Along with a positive assessment of the possibilities of knowledge, in the 17th century, the philosophical agnosticism who denied the possibility of human knowledge of the world. He showed himself in the works of Berkeley and Hume, who believed that a person only knows the world of phenomena, but is not able to penetrate into the depths of things, to reach knowledge of the laws of the surrounding nature.

The views of Spinoza, who claimed that nature is the cause of itself and all the processes occurring in it, had a pantheistic orientation. God does not stand above nature, but is its internal cause. Knowledge is achieved by the mind and it is the first condition for the free activity of man. The German philosopher Leibniz emphasized the spiritual nature of the world. The basis of the universe are monads, as units of being, giving the world diversity and harmony.

In the 17th century, widespread "legal" outlook. Within its framework, the theory of the "social contract" was developed (Hobbes, Locke). She explained the origin of the state as a voluntary agreement of people in the name of their own security. This worldview professed the idea of ​​natural human rights to freedom and property. The legal worldview expressed the mood of the young bourgeoisie, as a class that was formed in the New Age.

In the development of the social teachings of modern times in the 18th century, a special contribution was made by French Enlightenment(Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau), who ideologically prepared the French Revolution of 1789-1794. They perceived the church as a symbol of ignorance and obscurantism, a brake on the development of society, so Voltaire's motto: "Crush the reptile!" became the slogan of the era, predetermining the requirements for the separation of church and state. According to the Enlighteners social progress possible only with the help of reason, law, science and education. Man is a natural and social being and is capable of endless development and improvement of his activity. But private property makes people unequal, gives rise to envy and hostility between them, therefore, a new society must be created on the basis of social equality and justice. The enlighteners stood on the positions of historical optimism, and their ideal was the republic as a form of democracy.

A significant contribution to the doctrine of the nature and essence of man, the ways of his education, was made by French Materialists 18th century: Diderot, Helvetius, Holbach. They believed that man is a product of his environment. Therefore, in order to change the morals of people, it is necessary to change the circumstances of their lives. This idea of ​​the Enlighteners was the source of the emergence of Marxist philosophy.

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Philosophy of the New Time - briefly the most important thing. We continue our acquaintance with philosophy in a short, simple presentation. In previous articles, you learned about such periods of philosophy:

So, let's turn to the philosophy of the New Time.

Philosophy of the New Time - briefly the most important

The 17th-18th centuries is the period to which the philosophy of the new time belongs. It was a time when human civilization made a qualitative leap in the development of many scientific disciplines, which in turn had a huge impact on philosophy.

In the philosophy of modern times, the idea that the human mind has no limits to its power, and science has unlimited possibilities in its knowledge of the surrounding world and man, has become increasingly dominant.

Especially characteristic of this period in the development of philosophy is the tendency to explain everything from the point of view of materialism. This was due to the fact that natural science was a priority at that time and had a strong influence on all spheres of social life.

The main directions of the philosophy of the New Time - empiricism and rationalism

For philosophical thought of that time are characteristic several clear directions:

• empiricism,
• rationalism,
• philosophy of education,
• French materialism..

Is empiricism in philosophy?

Empiricism is a direction in philosophy that recognizes only experience and sensory perception in cognition and downplays the role of theoretical generalizations.

Empiricism opposed rationalism and mysticism. Formed in the English philosophy of the 17th century, led by Fr. Bacon (1561-1626), Hobbes, Locke.

Is rationalism in philosophy?

Rationalism is a direction in philosophy that recognizes only the mind as the only source of knowledge, denying knowledge through experience and sensory perception.

The word "rationalism" comes from the Latin word for "reason" - ratio. Rationalism was formed led by Descartes (1596-1650), Leibniz, Spinoza.

Enlightenment philosophy of the 18th century

The philosophy of enlightenment of the 18th century was formed in the Age of Enlightenment. It was one of the important periods of European history, was associated with the development of philosophical, scientific and social thought. It was based on free-thinking and rationalism.

The Age of Enlightenment began in England under the influence of the scientific revolution of the 17th century and spread to France, Germany and Russia. Its representatives Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau.

18th century French materialism

French materialism of the 18th century is a trend in philosophy that revived epicureanism, interest in the philosophy of antiquity.

Formed in France 17-18 centuries. Its representatives are Lameter, Holbach, Helvetius.

Problems of Philosophy of the New Time

A special place in the philosophy of modern times was occupied by the problem of being and substance, it was in it, according to philosophers, that the whole essence of the world and the ability to control it lay.

Substance and its properties were the focus of attention of philosophers, since, in their opinion, the task of philosophy was to make man the master of natural forces. Therefore, the basic task was the study of substance, as the basic category of everything that exists.

As a result, several currents have formed in philosophy regarding the study of substance. The first of these was founded by Bacon, who believed that substance is the basis of all things. The second was founded by Locke. He, in turn, tried to comprehend the substance from the point of view of epistemology.

Locke believed that concepts are based on the external world, and the objects that we see have only quantitative features, and differ from each other only in primary qualities. In his opinion, matter does not have any variety. Objects differ only in figures, rest and movement.

Hume sharply criticized the idea that substance has any material basis. In his opinion, there is only an “idea” of substance, and it was under this that he summed up the association of perception.

Representatives of this trend made a significant breakthrough in the study and further development of the theory of knowledge, where the main subjects of study were the problems of the scientific approach in philosophy and the methods of studying the reality around him, as well as the relationship between external and internal experience, combined with the problem of obtaining true knowledge.

As a result of the study of all the above problems, the main trends in the philosophy of modern times arose - empiricism and rationalism. The founder of empiricism was F. Bacon. Rationalism was represented by Descartes and Spinoza.

The main ideas of the philosophy of modern times

The main ideas were the principles of an independently thinking subject and methodical doubt. And also in it the method of intellectual intuition and the inductive-empirical method of cognition of the world were developed.

In addition, methods of jurisprudence and ways to protect the freedom of people were developed. The main goal was the intention to embody the ideas of freedom from religion, to build a vision of the world based on scientific knowledge.

The main ideas of the philosophy of the New Time:

Books on the philosophy of modern times

• W.Hösle. The geniuses of modern philosophy
• P.D. Shashkevich. Empiricism and Rationalism in Modern Philosophy

Philosophy of the New Age. VIDEO LECTURE

Summary

I hope the article The Philosophy of the New Time - briefly the most important" turned out to be useful for you. We can say that the philosophy of the New Time has become a significant driving force in the development of the entire human civilization, prepared the basis for the improvement of the philosophical scientific paradigm and substantiated the methods of rational knowledge.

The next article is devoted to the topic "German classical philosophy".

I wish everyoneunquenchable thirst for knowledge of yourself and the world around you, inspiration in all your affairs!

Starting from the 17th century. natural science, astronomy, mathematics, and mechanics are rapidly developing; the development of science could not but influence philosophy.

In philosophy, the doctrine of the omnipotence of reason and the limitless possibilities of scientific research arises.

characteristic of modern philosophy is strong materialistic tendency arising primarily from experimental natural science.

Major representatives of the philosophy of modern times are:

• (England);
• Thomas Hobbes (England);
• John Locke (England);
• (France);
• (Holland);
• Gottfried Leibniz (Germany).

Problems of modern philosophy

In the philosophy of modern times, much attention is paid to the problems of being and substance - ontology, especially when it comes to movement, space and time.

The problems of substance and its properties are of interest to literally everyone, because the task of science and philosophy (to promote the health and beauty of man, as well as increase his power over nature) led to an understanding of the need to study the causes of phenomena, their essential forces.

In the philosophy of this period, two approaches to the concept of "substance" appear:

• ontological understanding of substance as the ultimate foundation of being, the founder - Francis Bacon (1561-1626);
• epistemological understanding of the concept of "substance", its necessity for scientific knowledge, the founder - John Locke (1632-1704).

According to Locke, ideas and concepts have their source in the external world, material things. Material bodies have only quantitative features, there is no qualitative variety of matter: material bodies differ from each other only in size, figure, movement and rest (primary qualities). Smells, sounds, colors, tastes are secondary qualities, they, Locke believed, arise in the subject under the influence of primary qualities.

English philosopher David Hume(1711-1776) was looking for the answers of being, opposing materialistic understanding substances. He, rejecting the real existence of material and spiritual substance, believed that there is an “idea” of substance, under which the association of human perception is summed up, which is inherent in ordinary, and not scientific knowledge.

Features of the philosophy of modern times

The philosophy of modern times took a huge step in the development (epistemology), the main ones were:

• problems of philosophical scientific method;
• methodology of human cognition of the external world;
• connections of external and internal experience;
• the task of obtaining reliable knowledge. Two main epistemological directions have emerged:
• (founder - F. Bacon);
• (R. Descartes, B. Spinoza, G. Leibniz). The main ideas of the philosophy of the New Age:
• the principle of an autonomously thinking subject;
• principle of methodical doubt;
• inductive-empirical method;
• intellectual intuition or rational-deductive method;
• hypothetical-deductive construction of scientific theory;
• development of a new legal worldview, justification and protection of the rights of a citizen and a person.

The main task of modern philosophy was an attempt to realize the idea autonomous philosophy, free from religious prerequisites; build an integral worldview on reasonable and experimental grounds, revealed by research on the cognitive ability of a person.

In addition, the philosophy of the New Age was characterized by such features as:

• mechanism. As a model for building a picture of the world, the ideas of mechanics were taken - a branch of knowledge that was very popular at that time and was the most developed. At the same time, philosophers proceeded from the assumption that all spheres of being are organized and function in accordance with the laws of this science;
• special interest in the problems of knowledge. In modern times, philosophy approaches science as closely as possible, continuing to move away from theology and religion and starting to move away from art, with which it approached during the Renaissance. Naturally, this was due to the very rapid growth in the importance of scientific methods for the culture and socio-economic life of that time. Therefore, philosophy sought to satisfy the needs of society associated with the development of methods of natural science knowledge;
• preference for the metaphysical method. The world was considered as a collection of bodies that exist without changing. This had consequences for the ideas about thinking and the conceptual apparatus of science and philosophy. If objects do not change, and consciousness reflects reality, then all concepts are something static, unchanging. Therefore, it is necessary to study them separately from each other.

Ideas of modern philosophy

The philosophy of modern times has done a lot for the development of the theory of knowledge (epistemology). The main steel ideas.

End of the 16th - 17th centuries were marked by fundamental changes in almost all spheres of public life in Western European countries. There is a transition from guild handicraft to manufactory, and then to machine production; the formation of national markets and the beginning of the formation of the world market, in connection with which the struggle of the third estate for freedom of management and access to public administration is growing and intensifying, resulting in a series of early bourgeois revolutions. In the spiritual sphere, the Church Reformation, begun in the Renaissance, is being completed - the separation of new religious confessions from Catholicism (Protestantism in its specific forms of Calvinism and Anglicanism, etc.), the need for scientific knowledge is growing, as necessary condition technical and technological progress. All this testifies to the birth of a new social order- capitalistic.

The ongoing industrial revolution gave a powerful impetus not only to natural science, but also to philosophy. The development of exact knowledge more and more insistently demanded the rejection of the scholastic way of thinking and its replacement with a new one, facing the real world and based on experience, experiment. Science is increasingly beginning to acquire autonomy from religion and from a servant of theology to turn into a productive force of society. This provided space for the spread of the materialistic worldview, perked up after centuries of dominance of religion and the church.

However, the materialism of that time was predominantly mechanistic and metaphysical in nature. This was explained by the fact that, firstly, it was mechanics and mathematics that achieved the greatest success, and the laws and initial principles discovered by them seemed to be the personification of accuracy. Therefore, it was in them that the thinkers of that era saw the key to understanding nature, to the secrets of the universe. Secondly, the emergence of scientific natural science was accompanied by the differentiation of previously unified knowledge about the world, which is part of philosophy, and the identification of a number of specialized areas, as well as their desire to separate both from each other and from philosophy. This contributed to the consideration of objects also outside their diverse mutual influences, except, perhaps, mechanical interactions, which led to a one-sided approach to their knowledge, to the loss of the principles of understanding the world, characteristic of ancient dialectics, such, in particular, as the comprehensiveness and integrity of consideration, the internal inconsistency of things. and the process of learning them. All of the above led to the fact that the problem of self-development was actually eliminated from science and philosophy. Recognizing and even quite deeply cognizing movement (primarily mechanical) as an attribute of the material world, the metaphysical materialism of that time understands the development of the world in a very limited and superficial way.

At the same time, in connection with the growing need for scientific knowledge as the basis for the development of production, the problems of epistemology and the methodology of cognition begin to occupy a central place in philosophical teachings. In the process of solving these problems in philosophy, two opposing currents were formed: rationalism and empiricism .

The seventeenth century opens a new period in the development of philosophy, which is commonly called the philosophy of modern times.

In the last third of the 16th - early 17th century, a bourgeois revolution took place in the Netherlands, which played an important role in the development of capitalist relations in bourgeois countries. From the middle of the 17th century (1640-1688) the bourgeois revolution unfolded in England, the most industrially developed European country. These early bourgeois revolutions were prepared by the development of manufactory production, which replaced handicraft work.

The development of a new bourgeois society generates a change not only in the economy, politics and social relations, it also changes the consciousness of people. The most important factor Such a change in social consciousness is science, and, above all, experimental-mathematical natural science, which just in the 17th century is going through a period of its formation: it is no coincidence that the 17th century is usually called the era of the scientific revolution. Science-centrism - everything is explained in true and certain knowledge.

In the 17th century, the division of labor in production necessitated the rationalization of production processes, and thus the development of science, which could stimulate this rationalization.

The development of modern science, as well as social transformations associated with the disintegration of feudal social orders and the weakening of the influence of the church, brought to life a new orientation of philosophy. If in the Middle Ages it acted in alliance with theology, and in the Renaissance with art and humanitarian knowledge, now it relies mainly on science.

Therefore, in order to understand the problems that faced the philosophy of the 17th century, one must take into account: firstly, the specifics of a new type of science - experimental-mathematical natural science, the foundations of which were laid precisely during this period; and, secondly, since science occupies a leading place in the worldview of this era, the problems of the theory of knowledge come to the fore in philosophy - epistemology.

The most important distinguishing feature of modern philosophy compared to scholasticism is innovation. But it should be especially emphasized that the first philosophers of the Modern Age were the disciples of the neo-scholastics. However, with all the strength of their minds and souls, they sought to revise, test the inherited knowledge for the truth and strength.

The old knowledge was revised, and solid rational grounds were found for the new title.

The search for rationally substantiated and provable truths of philosophy, comparable with the truths of science, is another feature of the philosophy of modern times.

The formation of modern science, in particular natural science, is characterized by an orientation towards the knowledge of reality, based on feeling. turn to sensory knowledge reality, which we have already met in the Renaissance, brings with it an unprecedented increase in evidence in various areas of both emerging science and industrial and social (handicraft) practice.

The formation of natural science in this period is associated with a tendency to cognize not single, isolated factors, but certain systems, integrity.

A person is trying to find an answer to the most general and deep questions: what is the world around and what is the place and purpose of a person in it? What underlies everything that exists: material or spiritual? Is the world subject to any laws? can a person cognize the world around him, what is this cognition? What is the meaning of life, its purpose? Such questions are called worldview questions.

The main problem of the philosophy of the New Age is the problem of knowledge, scientific methods, social structure

The problems of epistemology come to the fore. Gnoseological philosophy consists in the study of the cognitive relationship in the “world-man” system.

Two main directions of modern philosophy:

1. Empiricism is a trend in the theory of knowledge that recognizes sensory experience as the only source of knowledge.

a) idealistic empiricism (represented by J. Berkeley (1685-1753), D. Hume (1711-1776). Empirical experience is a set of sensations and ideas, the magnitude of the world is equal to the magnitude of experience

b) materialistic empiricism (represented by F. Bacon, T. Hobbes) - the source of sensory experience of the existing external world.

2. Rationalism (Latin reasonable) highlights the logical basis of science, recognizes reason as the source of knowledge and the criterion of its truth.

Epistemology– philosophy about human knowledge. Man and society in their being change the world around them, but society can exist only by changing the world. This practical attitude to the world is the practical basis of society.

F. Bacon and R. Descartes were the direct forerunners and ideologists of the emerging science.

Let us now consider what contributions were made to the development of science by the outstanding representatives of the New Age. We are talking about a powerful movement - the scientific revolution, which acquires in the 17th century. character traits in the works of Galileo, the ideas of Bacon and Descartes, and which will subsequently be completed in the classical Newtonian image of the Universe, similar to a clockwork.

In the one hundred and fifty years that separate Copernicus from Newton, not only the image of the world is changing. Connected with this change is also a change - also slow, painful, but steady - of ideas about man, about science, about the man of science, about scientific search and scientific institutes, about the relationship between science and society, between science and philosophy, and between scientific knowledge and religious faith.

Science is an experimental science. In the experiment, scientists acquire true judgments about the world. And this is a new image of science - emerging from theories systematically controlled by experiment.

As a result of the "scientific revolution" a new image of the world was born, with new religious and anthropological problems. At the same time, a new image of science emerged - developing autonomously, socially and under control. Another fundamental characteristic of the scientific revolution is the formation of knowledge, which, unlike the previous, medieval, unites theory and practice, science and technology, creating a new type of scientist - the bearer of that type of knowledge, which, in order to gain strength, needs constant control from practice and experience. The scientific revolution gives rise to the modern scientist-experimenter, whose strength lies in the experiment, which becomes more and more rigorous thanks to new measuring instruments, more and more accurate.

Speaking about the formation of science in the 17th century. it is impossible not to note the formation of a mechanical picture of the world at that time and the role of the Reformation in the process of formation new painting peace.

The intensive development of productive forces characteristic of the New Age in the conditions of the emerging capitalist formation, which caused the rapid flowering of science (especially natural science), required fundamental changes in methodology, the creation of fundamentally new methods of scientific research, both philosophical and private scientific. The progress of experimental knowledge, experimental science required the replacement of the scholastic method of thinking with a new method of cognition, addressed to the real world. The principles of materialism and elements of dialectics were revived and developed.