[Lecture Six] Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 2 hours, 39 minutes
Course summary: Presented as two complementary twelve-lecture courses—Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume and Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present—The History of Philosophy covers the whole of western philosophy from its discovery in Ancient Greece to the twentieth century, including Objectivism. Dr. Peikoff argues that philosophy is the means by which we can understand any human culture and, more broadly, the history and changing course of a civilization. Read more »
In this lecture: In this lecture, Dr. Peikoff explores how three supposed defenders of science, Comte, Mill, and Spencer, ultimately worked to undermine it even further. He shows that the embrace of extreme nominalism produced Comte’s positivism and further undermined causality as well as supported his embrace of altruism in ethics and collectivism in politics. He concludes by highlighting how Mill’s utilitarianism and Spencer’s evolutionism both attempted to defend capitalism and failed.
Study Guide
This material is designed to help you digest the lecture content. You can also download below a PDF study guide for the entire course.
| How did Comte’s extension of Hume lead to a rejection of self? |
| In the absence of causality, how does Comte defend science? |
| Explain Comte’s resolution of science and religion in his theory of society. |
| Why did Bentham and Mill reject final answers in logic? |
| What did the utilitarians use as an objective basis for their ethics? |
| What are some of the flaws with the hedonic calculus? |
| How did Spencer mistake the implications of evolution for human society? |
| Explain how Spencer’s ethics led to his concession to collectivism in politics. |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 2:19:56 | Where does Comte get the concept “humanity” from if all we perceive are individuals? |
| 2:20:52 | In the strict sense in which you use the term, is the body of ideas known as Objectivism also a “coherent” identification of reality or rather solely a correspondence one? |
| 2:22:35 | Where does Marx fit in on the primacy of consciousness versus the primacy of existence issue? |
| 2:23:05 | The Utilitarians may object to the charge that hedonism is impossible as a guide to action because it requires the contradiction of pleasure-perceived valuing by pointing out that there are biologically given sources of pleasure, namely sensual pleasure such as sex, warmth, cold, etc. |
| 2:26:03 | How do ethical hedonists define the term “pleasure”? Is this instantaneous or integration over a lifetime or what? Are the terms “happiness” and “pleasure” used interchangeably? |
| 2:27:57 | You object to Utilitarianism’s determinism that man should want pleasure because, by nature, he does not want pleasure. Isn’t it likewise deterministic to say that man should value life? Isn’t this central to the Objectivist view? |
| 2:29:47 | The Marxists offer the view of a future world of plenty. But if every man only takes what he needs, all he will take is that which is necessary to keep him alive so he can serve the needs of others. |
| 2:32:52 | Would you please review why psychological hedonism is incompatible with free will? |
| 2:34:25 | How would Comte answer the following: if there are no minds of consciousnesses, who or what perceives the flux of sense data? |
| 2:36:02 | You indicated that Comte’s defense of altruism was on the basis of “religious feelings.” Does he take the concept of “duty” from Kant or is it a type of hedonism whereby “religious feeling” is the pleasure? |
| 2:36:31 | Did Mill introduce any qualitative criteria for evaluating pleasure? |