A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition Read Online Free

and set forth its conclusions with the best intention of determining their truth. To be able to do this one will need capacities of a different kind from those of the people most strongly influenced by the doctrine. One may indeed come to the conclusion (not in this case but certainly in the case of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man) that a philosophical work of immense historical importance has no significant place in the history of philosophy.
    In what follows the reader must bear in mind this distinction between the history of philosophy and the history of ideas, and recognise that the history that I am outlining is as much created by as it has created the current state of philosophical understanding. My method, however, will be, not to expound the arguments of philosophers in full, but to outline the main conclusions, their philosophical significance, and the kinds of consideration that led their authors to espouse them.

2 -  THE RISE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY
    The tradition which has marked out Descartes as the founder of ‘modern’ philosophy should not lead us to erect an impassable barrier between the thought of the seventeenth century and all that had preceded it and made it possible. The method of philosophy changed radically as a result of Descartes’ arguments. But much of its content remained the same. It should not therefore be regarded as surprising if some modern philosophical idea can be shown to have been anticipated by the thinkers of the Middle Ages, in their manifold attempts either to reconcile religion and philosophy or else to divide them.
    The spirit of Plato, and that of his pupil and critic Aristotle, have haunted philosophy throughout its history, and it is to them that almost all medieval controversies in the subject can ultimately be traced. They each bequeathed to the world arguments and conceptions of superlative intellectual and dramatic power, and it is not surprising that, wherever they were read, their influence was felt. Each of the important Mediterranean religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—attempted either to assimilate their doctrines or to present some alternative that would be equally persuasive and equally compatible with our intuitive sense of the nature of the world and of our place within it.
    From Plato and the neo-Platonic tradition the medievals inherited a cosmology which both justified the belief in a supersensible reality, and at the same time presented an elevated picture of our ability to gain access to it. Plato had argued that the truth of the world is not revealed to ordinary sense-perception, but to reason alone; that truths of reason are necessary, eternal and (as we would now say) a priori; that through the cultivation of reason man can come to understand himself, God and the world as these things are in themselves, freed from the shadowy overcast of experience. The neo-Platonists developed the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus into a theory of creation, according to which the entire world emanates from the intellectual light of God’s self-contemplation. Reason, being the part of man which participates in the intellectual light, knows things not as they seem but as they are. This theory— initially metaphysical—seemed to imply a corresponding ‘natural philosophy’ (a natural philosophy which had both Platonic and Aristotelian variants). According to this natural philosophy the earth and earthly things reside at the centre of the turning spheres, each representing successive orders of intellection, and each subordinate to the ultimate sphere of immutability, where God resides in the company of the blessed. Reason is the aspiration towards that ultimate sphere, and man’s mortality is the occasion of his ascent towards it. This ascent is conditional upon his turning away from preoccupation with the ephemeral and the sensory towards the contemplation of eternal truth. This ‘natural philosophy’, persuasively expounded by Boethius (c. 480524 AD) in his