Hypothesis: We live in the Renaissance!
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- Posts: 75
- Joined: May 22nd, 2015, 10:06 pm
- Favorite Philosopher: Levinas
Hypothesis: We live in the Renaissance!
Elaboration: Renaissance philosophers such as Francis Bacon and Macchiavelli and Erasmus of Rotterdam didn't make "systems" but more made peacemeal analysises of smaller topics.
IMO because they didn't have a convincing general conceptual framework at the time.
Also today, it is often hard to classify philosophers in "schools" which is much easier in the 17th century with for instance Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz being rationalists.
We have for instance Peter Sloterdijk, Whitehead, Gaston Bachelard who can't really be put in any school as such. We also have philosophers writing in a poetic style (Levinas, Nietzsche), I guess because of the lack of an agreed-upon framework? So they decide to just go ahead and write what they thing, metaphorical or not.
Also - like in the renaissance we have BIG advances which has not fully been completed. We don't know the full social impact of the internet for instance. Robots and AI are just getting started.
As for science, there has been so many discoveries the last century or so that our conceptual framework is badly outdated in many parts. For instance transplantations seem to me to make mockery of our concepy of body and personal identity, and pointing more to a sort of "limbs and organs as replacable tools" concept. But we still keep the old concept with a personal relationshio to "our" limbs. I could give many more examples of these comnflict between scientific advances and general concepts - quantum mechanics, tectonics, etc - the upshot is just that it's a big mess
Our art is also strange, and seems to want to reinvent itself constantly, like it cannot find where our aestetic sensibility is? Many people do not even like out art, I suppose because art hasn't found their sensibility at all.
... the upshot of this is, I think, that the thought of our time will not be much remembered.
I think we are a period that needs to generete a lot of new CONCEPTS and just throw them in a pile - and then they can be put together in some generations time. Some of them will be discarded completely, lilke alchemy has been discarded.
2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
2023 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023