Mark Glouberman

In the book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues that: (1) modern secularism carries in it more than a trace residue of the explicitly religious way of thinking that it supersedes, and (2) the secular ensemble would not survive if the residue were filtered out. Modern secularism is not, in short, exclusively humanistic. Many who profess exclusive humanism, even perhaps the majority, are therefore—according to Taylor—exclusive humanists in name alone. My position is that Judeo-Christianity, in its teachings about men and women, is humanism. Humanism is what Western religion is all about at its core. This I defend by close examination of Taylor’s argument and by exposing some of the philosophical core of the Bible.

The recent scholarly promotion of Pierre Gassendi to a key position in the formative modern period raises doubts about the portrayal of Descartes as “the father” of the post-Scholastic philosophical conceptualization. I defend the Cartesio-centric account against Thomas M. Lennon’s elliptical alternative. The defense necessitates a reassessment of the root nature of Descartes’s contribution—specifically of the interplay between philosophy and science, the latter being the crucial extraphilosophical component of the new practico-cognitive ensemble. This raises questions about the “philosophically” of Descartes’s activity, and with that questions about the quality of modernity. By way of explaining Gassendis nonoriginative position, his attitude toward the post-Scholastic Humanist thought that Descartes simply repudiated is examined.

Did Descartes make a revolutionary contribution to philosophy? Given the widespread application to him of the title ‘father of modem philosophy,’ the standard affirmative proves surprisingly difficult to justify. ln this paper I locate Descartes’s epoch-making philosophical shift. Descartes contributed a very strong idea of realism, an idea modelled in his cogito-argument. To grasp the contribution aright, it is however necessary to de-emphasise what is usually identified as his key contribution---an epistemological one. AIso, the theoretical connection between Descartes’s core philosophical activity and the scientific revolution of his time has to be appreciated. ln the course of the discussion I explain, in a more philosophical vein, how the influence of Kant clouds the abiIity of post-Kantians to see what Descartes did. A route to an understanding of Descartes’s realism is an inconsistency in Kant’s modal views. The antirealism of Kant’s view---his transcendental idealism---yields up some of its mystery once the dialectical interplay with Cartesian realism is elicited.