Sample Essay On Scientific Developments Shaping Philosophy

The historical, cultural and scientific events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped human thoughts and philosophy. The purpose of science and philosophy is to explain the universe, meaning of life and where man fits in. Man has made progress based on the growth and development of science and philosophy.
The conventional opinions that were barriers to a richer human experience were attacked by Nietzsche, who disliked liberalism, communism, and socialism. He disagreed to the two-hundred-year-old western intellectual tradition of progress and condemned the morality of Christians. He advocated that the man was living alone in an absurd world without any God, and life is unjust and cruel. Man was a victim of the modern bourgeois society that only made him feeble and weak. According to him, Christianity weakened his reasoning and the intellect.
Freud believed that our thoughts were based on our unconscious impulses. While Freud saw irrationality as a potential danger, Nietzsche glorified it. Freud was convinced that the behavior of man was guided by inner forces that could be sometimes irrational, as there was an intellectual activity that was devoid of consciousness. The European Romantics were making use of the unconscious mind just like the ancient philosophers Nietzsche, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky. Freud was more scientific in temper, unlike Nietzsche's approach.
Scientific Revolution hastened the death of God, and with the rise of positivism and materialism and individualism, Marxism, Darwinism. Karl Marx was of the view that people should be allowed to think freely. The reality according to him is that their ideas were based on the dominant ideology of the ruling class and hence were false. Freud also agreed on false consciousness with Marx. Marx saw a dialectical struggle between social classes, and Freud saw the conflict of the human mind with itself.Karl Marx argued that people were free to think and believe their ideas about life, religion and philosophy.
Dostoevsky was both fascinated and horrified by the state of Western Civilization. According to his views, the life of the underground man living according to his individual responsibility is absurd and pointless. He gives an indication of the ridiculous grounds of modern life and thought and made a mocking of it. Dostoevsky looked upon the man to be irrational and rebellious. He criticized liberals, humanists and socialists for their attempts to improve mankind based on theoretical principles of human happiness.
Darwin argued that all living beings are influenced by the biological laws. Population growth led to survival and competition. Many Darwinists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries believed that many human characteristics such as loyalty, deceit and diligence were biologically innate, and could not be developed as the Europeans had thought previously.
As the scientific concepts and methods changed over time, they carried an influence on philosophical changes, as these changes were connected with the philosophy of science, rationality, and relativism. It is not feasible to disengage philosophy from scientific changes and development. Science progress based on a naïve realism was used to approach truth, and these proposals were criticized. As the scientific image of reality was proved wrong in the past, all future scientific discussions were seen to be untrue. The truth is that the past scientific theories were not incorrect, only they were represented inappropriately. However, they were not discarded entirely as they did have some of the structure correct. Historians and philosophers adapted results from cognitive science to develop new approaches to their field.