In class yesterday James Conant remarked that the starting point of the the standard philosophy core curriculum is early modern philosophy, even if the standard first course isn’t a course in the history of philosophy. It does seem fairly usual to introduce undergraduates to philosophy through the characteristic problems of early modern philosophy. The worry is that this practice implicitly casts early modern philosophical problems as definitive of philosophy itself, such that distinctively early modern versions of perennial problems, as well as uniquely early modern problems that aren’t themes in other eras of philosophy, are (perhaps unintentionally) suggested to represent the kinds of problem that philosophers from Plato to the present day are worried about. Thus the really hard thing, Conant suggested, is to really get back to ancient philosophy, or to really get forward to contemporary philosophy, without forcing either of the two into the early modern mold.
Early Modern Philosophy at the Core
Advertisement
Even though I very much admire James Conant’s work, I must disagree as a historian of early modern philosophy. The worry should be that the construction of what an early modern philosophical problem should be from the point of view of contemporary philosophy casts these constructions as definitive of philosophy itself. In fact, it is quite easy to get back to ancient philosophy from early modern philosophy properly understood: Descartes investigated preconditions of wisdom: The “Meditations” aren’t a textbook for epistemology 101, even though they are used that way today.
The road from early modern philosophy, properly understood, to contemporary debates is harder to grasp, the main stumbling block being Kant: Stereotypes like the contrast between rationalism and empiricism or taking his status as “Alleszermalmer” too seriously still barr us from understanding this complex nexus appropriately.