Modern period of philosophy tackles about the philosophy during 17th century. The philosophers like Rene Descartes, John Locke, and George Berkeley.

1. Modern Period

2. – Bertrand Russell

3. Guide questions:
• 1. What are the important events during the
Modern Period?
• 2. What philosophical movements were
introduced during the Modern Period?
• 3. Who are the major philosophers during this
period and what are their contributions to
education?
• 4. How does philosophy change during the
Modern Period?

4. What we'll
discuss
• Modern Period of Philosophy
• Major Philosophers
• Philosophical Movements

5. The Modern Period of Philosophy
• runs roughly from 1600 to 1800.
• an especially vibrant period in
Western European philosophy
spanning the 17th and 18th
centuries.

6. 1
generally regarded as the start of modern
philosophy, and roughly equates to the 17th Century.
2
The move away from theology and faith-based arguments,
and marks the shaking off of medieval approaches to
philosophy such as Scholasticism, in preference for more
unified philosophical systems like Rationalism and British
Empiricism.
Age of Reason

7. Philosophical Movements
Rationalism
- a philosophical movement which
gathered momentum during the Age of
Reason of the 17th Century.
- associated with the introduction of
mathematical methods into philosophy by
the major rationalist figures, Descartes,
Leibniz and Spinoza.

8. Philosophical Movements
Rationalism
- This is any view appealing to intellectual
and deductive reason as the source of
knowledge or justification.

9. Philosophical Movements
Rationalism
- contrasted with Empiricism and it is
often referred to as Continental
Rationalism because it was
predominant in the continental schools
of Europe, whereas British Empiricism
dominated in Britain.

10. Major Philosophers

11. Major Philosophers

12. Major Philosophers

13. Major Philosophers
- a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist and
writer of the Age of Reason.
- "Father of Modern Philosophy"
- "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am").
- one of the earliest and best known proponents of
Rationalism, which is often known as Cartesianism
- He believed that knowledge of eternal truths could be
attained by reason alone, without the need for any
sensory experience.

14. Major Philosophers
- He held that some ideas come from God; others
ideas are derived from sensory experience; and still
others are fictitious.
- The only ideas which are certainly valid are
those which are innate.

15. Major Philosophers
He outlined four main rules for himself in his
thinking:
• Never accept anything except clear and distinct
ideas.
• Divide each problem into as many parts are
needed to solve it.
• Order your thoughts from the simple to the
complex.
• Always check thoroughly for oversights.

16. Major Philosophers
Some of his famous works were:
Discourse on Method
(1637)
Meditations on First Philosophy
(1641)

17. Major Philosophers
- In order to escape the critique of solipsism
Descartes had to prove God’s existence since God
could be the only guarantee that:
1. Our clear and distinct ideas are true.
2. We are not being tricked by an evil demon.

18. Major Philosophers
His contribution in education:
- In mathematics: Cartesian coordinates,
Cartesian geometry, and notation.
- In optics: angular radius of a rainbow is 42
degrees, law of reflection.
- In physics, Descartes introduced the concept of
momentum of a moving body, which he defined as
the product of the mass of the body and its velocity
or speed.

19. Major Philosophers
His contribution in education:
- In an attempt to explain the orbits of planets,
Descartes also constructed his vortex theory.
- He continued to cling to the traditional
mechanical philosophy of the 17th Century, which
held that everything physical in the universe to be
made of tiny "corpuscles" of matter

21. Major Philosophers
- An English philosopher of the Age of Reason.
- His famous 1651 book "Leviathan" and his social
contract theory.
- Hobbes looked on politics as a secular discipline,
divorced from theology, and he has always attracted
his share of powerful detractors.

22. Major Philosophers
- He was insistent that theological disputes should be
kept out of politics.
- He claimed there is no natural source of authority
to order our lives, and that human judgment is
inherently unreliable, and therefore needs to be
guided.

23. Major Philosophers
- In his "Leviathan" of 1651, Hobbes set out his
doctrine of the foundation of states and legitimate
governments, based on social contract theories
(Contractarianism).
- Hobbes postulated what life would be like without
government, a condition which he called the "state of
nature" and which he argued inevitably leads to
conflict and lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short".

24. Major Philosophers
- Hobbes' ethical views were based on the premise that
what we ought to do depends greatly on the situation in
which we find ourselves: where political authority is
lacking, our fundamental right is self-preservation; where
political authority exists, however, our duty is merely to
obey those in power.
- He was also known as a scientist, as a mathematician,
as a translator of the classics, and as a writer on law.

25. Major Philosophers
- an English philosopher of the Age of Reason and
early Age of Enlightenment.
- first of the British Empiricists
- He argued that all of our ideas are ultimately
derived from experience, and the knowledge of
which we are capable is therefore severely limited in
its scope and certainty.

26. Major Philosophers
- He postulated, that the mind was a "tabula
rasa" (or "blank slate") and that people are born
without innate ideas.

27. Major Philosophers
John Locke had three main interest:
1. Political interest
2. Epistemological interest
3. Scientific interest

28. Major Philosophers
- He claimed that "the mind is furnished with
ideas by experience alone"
- He also argued that a proper application of our
cognitive capacities is enough to guide our action in
the practical conduct of life, and that it is in the
process of reasoning that the mind confronts the raw
ideas it has received.

29. Major Philosophers
- For Locke, the senses themselves are a basic and
fundamental faculty which deliver knowledge in
their own right. Indeed, his whole conception of an
idea differed from that of Descartes: for Descartes,
an idea was fundamentally intellectual; for Locke it
was fundamentally sensory, and all thought involved
images of a sensory nature.

30. Major Philosophers
- Locke started from a belief that humans have
absolute natural rights, in the sense of universal
rights that are inherent in the nature of Ethics, and
not contingent on human actions or beliefs.
- Locke believed that no one should be allowed
absolute power, and introduced the idea of the
separation of powers, whereby the Church and the
judicial system operate independently of the ruling
class.

31. Major Philosophers
- In 1693, Locke produced his contribution to the
Philosophy of Education, his influential "Some
Thoughts Concerning Education".
- According to Locke, the mind was to be educated
by a three-pronged approach:
the development of a healthy body;
the formation of a virtuous character;
and the choice of an appropriate academic
curriculum.

32. Major Philosophers
- Some of John Locke’s famous works were:
1. “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”:
• a close examination of the human mind.
2. “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689)
• strict separation between Church and State.
• new understanding of the relationship between
government and religion

33. “Every man has a property in his own
person. This nobody has a right to,
but himself.“
– John Locke

34. Major Philosophers
Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz
- A German philosopher, mathematician, scientist
and polymath of the Age of Reason.
- Formulated the Problem of Evil
- He devised the eccentric metaphysical theory of
monads.

35. Major Philosophers
- He is equally important in the history of
mathematics, as the inventor of calculus, and as the
discoverer of the binary system.

36. Major Philosophers
- The "Théodicée", written in 1710, tries to justify
the apparent imperfections of the world and to
tackle the Problem of Evil in a world created by a
good God.

37. Major Philosophers
- Leibniz's best known contribution to
Metaphysics is his theory of monads.
- Monads are the ultimate elements of the
universe.

38. Major Philosophers
- According to Leibniz's theory, human beings and
even God himself are monads, and the existence of
God can be inferred from the harmony prevailing
among all other monads .
- The external world is ideal and phenomenal,
and its motion is the result of a dynamic force on
these simple and immaterial monads.

39. Major Philosophers
- Leibniz published an essay called "Principles of
Nature and Grace, Based on Reason" (1714).
- He enunciated the principal properties of what we
now call conjunction, disjunction, negation, identity,
set inclusion and the empty set.

40. Major Philosophers
- He defining a "real" character as a written sign
that represents an idea directly, and not simply as
the word embodying an idea, and proposed a
"universal characteristic", built on an alphabet of
human thought, in which each fundamental concept
would be represented by a unique "real" character,
with more complex thoughts represented by
combining characters.

41. Major Philosophers
Contribution to education:
1. mathematical notion of a function explicitly
2. coefficients of a system of linear equations could
be arranged into an array
3. He is credited, along with Sir Isaac Newton, with
the discovery of infinitesimal calculus, to find
the area under the function y = x.
4. He introduced several notations used to this day
and the familiar .

42. Major Philosophers
Contribution to education:
5. He had perfected his binary system of arithmetic,
which was later used in most computers.
6. In physics, he devised a new theory of motion
based on kinetic energy and potential energy,
which posited space, time and motion as relative
7. In psychology, he anticipated the distinction
between conscious and unconscious states.
8. In sociology, he laid the ground for communication
theory.

43. Major Philosophers
Contribution to education:
9. In public health, he advocated establishing a
medical administrative authority, with powers
over epidemiology and veterinary medicine.
10.In economics, he proposed tax reforms and a
national insurance scheme, and discussed the
balance of trade.
11.He was also an inventor and engineer, and has
been claimed as the "father of applied science.”

44. Major Philosophers
Contribution to education:
9. He designed wind-driven propellers and water
pumps, mining machines to extract ore,
hydraulic presses, water desalination systems,
lamps, submarines, clocks, etc, and even an early
steam engine.

45. Major Philosophers
- a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin
who lived and worked during the Age of Reason.
- he is considered one of the great Rationalists of the
17th Century
- His first published work, the "Principia
philosophiae cartesianae" ("Principles of Cartesian
Philosophy") of 1663,

46. Major Philosophers
- The "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" ("Theologico-
Political Treatise") of 1670 was an examination of superficial
popular religion and a vigorous critique of the militant
Protestantism practiced in Holland.

47. Major Philosophers
- He visualized a God that was not a transcendent
creator of the universe who rules over the universe by
providence, but a God that itself is the deterministic
system of which everything in nature is a part.

48. Major Philosophers
- Spinoza held that absolutely everything that happens
occurs through the operation of necessity, leaving absolutely
no room for free will and spontaneity.
- Spinoza's Ethics have much in common with Stoicism in
as much as both philosophies sought to fulfill a therapeutic
role by instructing people how to attain happiness.
- He asserted that the "highest good" was knowledge of
God.

49. Major Philosophers
- He contended that an emotion can only be
displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion,
and that knowledge of the true causes of passive
emotions could transform them into active
emotions.

50. Major Philosophers
- Spinoza took the Moral Relativist position that
nothing is intrinsically good or bad, except to the
extent that it is subjectively perceived to be by the
individual.
- Everything that happens comes from the essential
nature of objects or of God/Nature, and so, reality is
perfection, and everything done by humans and other
animals is also excellent and divine.

51. Major Philosophers
- a French philosopher, mathematician and scientist
of the Age of Reason.
- He opposed both the Rationalism of René
Descartes and the main countervailing philosophy,
British Empiricist, as being insufficient for
determining major truths.

52. Major Philosophers
- His first major literary work on religion, the
"Lettres provinciales" ("Provincial Letters").
- Pascal's best known foray into the Philosophy of
Religion was his argument for belief in God, which
has become known as Pascal’s Wager.

53. Major Philosophers
He argued as follows:
• If we believe in God, then if he exists we will
receive an infinite reward in heaven, while if he does
not then we have lost little or nothing.
• On the other hand, if we do not believe in God,
then if he exists we will receive an infinite
punishment in hell, while if he does not then we will
have gained little or nothing.

54. Major Philosophers
He argued as follows:
• Therefore, "either receiving an infinite reward in
heaven or losing little or nothing" is clearly preferable
to "either receiving an infinite punishment in hell or
gaining little or nothing", so it is rational to believe in
God, even if there is no evidence that he exists.

55. Major Philosophers
Contribution to education:
- He constructed a mechanical calculator capable of
addition and subtraction, known as Pascal's Calculator
- He completed another mathematical milestone, his "Traité
du triangle arithmétique" ("Treatise on the Arithmetical
Triangle") in which he described a convenient tabular
presentation for binomial coefficients, now called Pascal's
Triangle

56. Major Philosophers
Contribution to education:
- He corresponded with Pierre de Fermat (1601 -
1665) on the new mathematical theory of
probabilities, and their work on the calculus of
probabilities laid important groundwork for Gottfried
Leibniz's later formulation of the infinitesimal
calculus.
- Pascal pursued the study of hydrodynamics and
hydrostatics, and clarified the concepts of pressure
and vacuum.

57. Major Philosophers
Contribution to education:
5. His inventions include the hydraulic press and
the syringe.
"In order to show that a hypothesis is evident, it
does not suffice that all the phenomena follow from
it; instead, if it leads to something contrary to a
single one of the phenomena, that suffices to
establish its falsity".
- Blaise Pascal

58. Major Philosophers
- A French philosopher of the Age of Reason.
- he was also a devout Christian, and sought to
synthesize the thought of Descartes and St.
Augustine in order to demonstrate the active role
of God in every aspect of the world, developing in
the process his own doctrine of Occasionalism.

59. Major Philosophers
- Malebranche divided truth into two
categories: relations of magnitude and
relations of quality or perfection.

60. Major Philosophers
- He suggested that the mind's intellectual
conception of ideas is pure and direct, its sensual
perception of them will be modified by
"sensations" proper to individual created minds.

61. Major Philosophers
- He argued that body could not act on mind, nor
mind on body, and the only active power is God.
- This idea developed into Malebranche's main
doctrine of Occasionalism, that God is the only
causal agent and that all created things merely
provide "occasions" for divine activity.

62. Philosophical Movements
2.Existentialism
 a movement in philosophy and literature that emphasizes
individual existence, freedom and choice.

63. Philosophical Movements
2.Existentialism
 -Existentialism in its currently recognizable form was
developed by the 19th Century Danish philosopher
Søren Kierkegaard and the German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche, although neither actually used
the term in their work.

64. Philosophical Movements
2.Existentialism
-In Kierkegaard's case, this results in the
"knight of faith", who puts complete faith in himself
and in God, as described in his 1843 work "Fear
and Trembling".

65. Philosophical Movements
2.Existentialism
In Nietzsche's case, the much maligned
"Übermensch" (or "Superman") attains superiority
and transcendence without resorting to the "other-
worldliness" of Christianity, in his books "Thus
Spake Zarathustra" (1885) and "Beyond Good and
Evil" (1887).

66. Philosophical Movements
2.Existentialism
-Sartre is perhaps the most well-known, as well as
one of the few to have actually accepted being
called an "existentialist". "Being and Nothingness"
(1943) is his most important work, and his novels
and plays, including "Nausea" (1938) and "No Exit”
(1944), helped to popularize the movement.

67. Philosophical Movements
2.Existentialism
-Simone de Beauvoir, an important
existentialist who spent much of her life alongside
Sartre, wrote about feminist and existential ethics
in her works, including "The Second Sex" (1949)
and "The Ethics of Ambiguity" (1947).

68. Philosophical Movements
2.Existentialism
-In "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942), Albert Camus
uses the analogy of the Greek myth of Sisyphus to
exemplify the pointlessness of existence, but shows
that Sisyphus ultimately finds meaning and
purpose in his task, simply by continually applying
himself to it.

69. Philosophical Movements
3. Materialism
the only thing that can be truly proven to exist is
matter.
all things are composed of material and all
phenomena are the result of material interactions,
with no accounting of spirit or consciousness.

70. Philosophical Movements
3. Materialism
-the word "materialist" refers to a person for
whom collecting material goods is an important
priority, or who primarily pursues wealth and
luxury or otherwise displays conspicuous
consumption. This can be more accurately termed
Economic Materialism.

71. Philosophical Movements
3. Materialism
 Lucretius wrote "De Rerum Natura" ("The Nature
of Things"), the first masterpiece of materialist
literature, around 50 B.C.

72. Types of Materialism
1. Dialectical Materialism is the
philosophical basis of Marxism and
Communism.
refers to the notion of a synthesis of Georg
Hegel's theory of Dialectics and Materialism
.

73. Types of Materialism
2. Historical Materialism is the Marxist
methodological approach to the study of society,
economics and history which was first articulated
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820 - 1895),
and has been expanded and refined by many
academic studies since.

74. Philosophical Movements
4. Idealism
 Is the metaphysical and epistemological doctrine
that ideas or thoughts make up fundamental
reality.
 a form of Monism and stands in direct contrast to
other Monist beliefs such as Physicalism and
Materialism .

75. Philosophical Movements
4. Idealism
 It is also contrasted with Realism
 The word "ideal" is also commonly used as an adjective to
designate qualities of perfection, desirability and
excellence, which is totally foreign to the epistemological
use of the word "idealism", which pertains to internal
mental representations.

76. Philosophical Movements
4. Idealism
 Plato is one of the first philosophers to discuss
what might be termed Idealism.

77. Philosophical Movements
4. Idealism
 René Descartes was one of the first to claim that
all we really know is what is in our own
consciousness, and that the whole external world is
merely an idea or picture in our minds.

78. Philosophical Movements
4. Idealism
 Nicolas Malebranche, refined this theory to state
that we only directly know internally the ideas in
our mind; anything external is the result of God's
operations, and all activity only appears to occur in
the external world. This kind of Idealism led to the
Pantheism of Spinoza.

79. Philosophical Movements
4. Idealism
 Gottfried Leibniz expressed a form of Idealism
known as Panpsychism.
 Bishop George Berkeley is sometimes known as
the "Father of Idealism", and he formulated one of
the purest forms of Idealism in the early 18th
Century.

80. Philosophical Movements
4. Idealism
 Immanuel Kant, the earliest and most
influential member of the school of German
Idealism, also started from the position of
Berkeley's British Empiricism

81. Philosophical Movements
4. Idealism
 Johann Gottlieb Fichte denied Kant's concept
of noumenon, arguing that the recognition of
an external of any kind would be the same as
admitting a real material thing.

82. Philosophical Movements
4. Idealism
 Friedrich Schelling also built on Berkeley and
Kant's work and, along with Hegel, he
developed Objective Idealism and the concept
of the "The Absolute", which Hegel later
developed further as Absolute Idealism.

83. Philosophical Movements
4. Idealism
 G. W. F. Hegel was another of the famous
German Idealists, and he argued that any
doctrine that asserts that finite qualities are
fully real is mistaken, because finite qualities
depend on other finite qualities to determine
them.

84. Philosophical Movements
4. Idealism
 Arthur Schopenhauer, built on Kant's division of
the universe into the phenomenal and the
noumenal, suggesting that noumenal reality was
singular whereas phenomenal experience involves
multiplicity, and effectively argued that everything is
ultimately an act of will.

85. Types of Idealism
A. Subjective Idealism
 the doctrine that the mind and ideas are the
only things that can be definitely known to
exist or have any reality, and that knowledge
of anything outside the mind is unjustified.

86. Types of Idealism
B. Transcendental Idealism
 is the view that our experience of things is
about how they appear to us
(representations), not about those things as
they are in and of themselves.

87. Types of Idealism
C. Objective Idealism
- the view that the world "out there" is in fact
Mind communicating with our human minds.
- Plato is regarded as one of the earliest
representatives of Objective Idealism

88. Types of Idealism
D. Absolute Idealism
- the view, initially formulated by G. W. F. Hegel, that
in order for human reason to be able to know the
world at all, there must be, an identity of thought and
being; otherwise, we would never have any means of
access to the world, and we would have no certainty
about any of our knowledge.

89. Other Types of Idealism
a. Epistemological Idealism asserts that minds
are aware of, or perceive, only their own ideas,
and not external objects, and therefore we
cannot directly know things in themselves, or
things as they really are.

90. Other Types of Idealism
b. Actual Idealism is a form of Idealism
developed by the Italian philosopher Giovanni
Gentile (1875 - 1944) that contrasted the
Transcendental Idealism of Kant and the
Absolute Idealism of Hegel.

91. Other Types of Idealism
c. Buddhist Idealism is the concept in Buddhist
thought that all existence is nothing but
consciousness, and therefore there is nothing
that lies outside of the mind.

92. Other Types of Idealism
d. Panpsychism holds that all parts of
matter involve mind or, alternatively, that
the whole universe is an organism that
possesses a mind.

93. Other Types of Idealism
e. Practical Idealism is a political
philosophy which holds it to be an
ethical imperative to implement ideals
of virtue or good.

94. Summary

95. References
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Modern_Philos
ophy
https://www.philosophybasics.com/historical_reason.html
https://theapeiron.co.uk/the-modern-period-ofphilosophy-
732f76e39e97
https://www.slideshare.net/lee_mabano/modern-period-
79597581?from_action=save

96. Thank You
for
listening!