Renaissance

One thing that happened during the Renaissance that was of great importance for the later character of modern philosophy was the birth of modern science. Even as in the Middle Ages philosophy was often thought of as the "handmaiden of theology," modern philosophers have often thought of their discipline as little more than the "handmaiden of science." Even for those who haven't thought that, the shadow of science, its spectacular success and its influence on modern life and history, has been hard to ignore.

For a long time, philosophers as diverse as David Hume, Karl Marx, and Edmund Husserl have seen the value of their in work in the claim that they were making philosophy "scientific." Those claims should have ended with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who for the first time clearly provided a distinction between the issues that science could deal with and those that it couldn't, but since Kant's theory could not be demonstrated the same way as a scientific theory, the spell of science, even if it is only through pseudo-science, continues.

The word "science" itself is simply the Latin word for knowledge: scientia. Until the 1840's what we now call science was "natural philosophy," so that even Isaac Newton's great book on motion and gravity, published in 1687, was The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis). Newton was, to himself and his contemporaries, a "philosopher." In a letter to the English chemist Joseph Priestley written in 1800, Thomas Jefferson lists the "sciences" that interest him as, "botany, chemistry, zoology, anatomy, surgery, medicine, natural philosophy [this probably means physics], agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, geography, politics, commerce, history, ethics, law, arts, fine arts." The list begins on familiar enough terms, but we hardly think of history,