Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

The Enlightenment Vision — Flowchart

The Enlightenment of the long 18th century was an era of awesome intellectual and cultural transformation.

My Enlightenment Vision flowchart [pdf] is pitched at a high level of abstraction, showing schematically how the philosophical revolution of the 17th century led to the 18th-century revolutions in science, technology, politics, and economics — which in turn led to the dramatic increase in health, wealth, freedom, and goods in the 19th century.

To put it another way, the chronology shows how the ideas played out as philosophy, then as an intellectual movement, then as activism, then as the working technology of culture.

I use the chart in my classes and published a version of it in my 2004 Explaining Postmodernism. It’s here as a PDF and as an Excel file, in case you’d like to adapt it for your own purposes.

[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]

Explaining Postmodernism: Chapter One online

My Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault has, gratifyingly, had two hardcover printings and eight softcover printings from 2004-2009.

Over the next while I will be making portions of the book available online at this new Explaining Postmodernism page here at my site.

To start, here are the Table of Contents [pdf] and Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [pdf]. Hope you enjoy.

And, of course, it’s available at Amazon.

[Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]

Who is the real father of modern philosophy?

I vote for Francis Bacon.
.
.

The standard answer gives the honor to René Descartes.

Descartes’s claim to the title is based primarily on his epistemology — specifically his method of doubt. The method of doubt is both a challenge to previous, more authoritarian epistemologies and a re-invigoration of a skepticism that exercises philosophers to this day.

Bacon’s reputation is also based in epistemology — his re-introduction and expansion of inductive methods. His empiricism is also a challenge to authoritarian epistemologies and grounds much of the scientific method used by investigators to this day.

How do we decide matters such as who should be considered the founder or father of modern philosophy? Let me propose four criteria.

1. Influence on academic philosophy. Descartes’s skeptical challenges have generated a huge literature in academic philosophy. Yet a huge literature has also been generated developing empirical methods in philosophy of science along lines established by Bacon. My call: a tie between Descartes and Bacon, absent a quantitative measure of the literature.

2. Influence on philosophy as used by all thinkers. Baconian epistemology has been internalized by most modern intellectuals (especially in the sciences and social sciences) and is part of their normal professional practice, and the more sophisticated inductive methods are explicitly used as guiding principles. The hardcore Cartesian skeptical challenges are rarely used outside academic philosophical discussions. My call: Bacon.

3. The positive and the negative. Descartes’s legacy is essentially negative. He digs philosophy into a skeptical hole from which many haven’t escaped. Bacon’s legacy is essentially positive. He provides tools many have used to develop new knowledge. Clearly there is still much truth to C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” thesis, in which much of the humanities is skeptical and pessimistic while much of the sciences is progressive and optimistic. My call: Absent a quantitative measure of the literature, a tie between Descartes and Bacon.

4. Chronology. Bacon’s key works were published in the first quarter of the 17th century: The Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605), The Wisdom of the Ancients (1619), Novum Organum (1620), and The New Atlantis (1626). Descartes’s key works were written in the second quarter of the 17th century, and some were not published until the third quarter: Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628; published posthumously in 1684), Discourse on Method (1637), Meditations on First Philosophy (written in 1641, published in 1647), and Principles of Philosophy (1644). My call: Bacon.

So by simple philosophy math, Bacon wins by two.

Before we revise the textbooks, let me ask: Are there other criteria we should consider?