Is there a need to renew philosophy and its pursuits?
I’ve suggested some ways that there are in the description of renewal philosophy. Now I’d like to think about ways to understand the epistemological attitude of our day. What does it mean to say we are in an age of skepticism? In what ways are there similarities between this time and the times before the Renaissance and the Enlightenment? How can we provide a more sure foundation than did these earlier attempts at answering skepticism? The following is from one of my books:
It takes time for belief systems to be lived out and their inadequacy revealed for all to see. The intellectual energy released in the attempt to fuse Aristotle and Christianity characterized the intellectual life for a significant portion of the Medieval Age. The incompatibility of Aristotelianism and Christianity was officially noted in 1276, but the untangling and disengaging of Christian thought from Aristotle required more time in which skeptical attacks on Aristotle’s epistemology and metaphysics made known the need for a foundation on which to build anew. Out of this skeptical backdrop the Modern Age emerged with thinkers like Descartes and Hobbes seeking to provide a new basis for thinking about what is certain and how the world works. Religious conflicts that retained medieval characteristics were set aside in favor of a division between private beliefs about what cannot be agreed on and public goods required by all.
Nevertheless, Modernity also lived itself out in time for all to see. Like Aristotelianism, it claimed to have provided a foundation for knowledge and a description about the world. Its denouement came in the same way, through skeptical attacks concerning the sufficiency of this foundation. Like the Medieval world, the Modern world drew to a close in a series of costly and deadly wars. In the aftermath, there is general agreement that the postcolonial, globalized world is a postmodern world, but little agreement about what would constitute a new foundation for rebuilding. It is the skeptical time between the death of one age and the beginning of another.
As Modernity progressed, scientific thinking increasingly limited all knowledge to the empirical and natural (material). Nevertheless, it rested on assumptions that could not be proven empirically. This empiricism and naturalism encouraged the embrace of nominalism. One implication was the rejection of the idea of a universal “human nature” and instead the study of only particularity and modest induction. Without the idea of a universal human nature, claims about the human good lost their meaning, and any law based on the good and human nature appeared unhelpful. The idea of the highest good was therefore challenged both by the rejection of final causes and by nominalism that denied universal natures in general and human nature more specifically.
This atmosphere of skepticism influences all areas of life.
From The Natural Moral Law: The Good After Modernity, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
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