There is very little content to the concept of modernity except as a term of contrast with antiquity and the Middle Ages, and what is signified as “modern” changes, depending upon the specific contrast one wishes to make. Historians often use the term to designate nineteenth-century phenomena such as the industrial revolution, the rise of capitalism, the institution of representative democracy, and urbanization. In philosophy, “modernity” is usually taken to refer to the period that discarded medieval or scholastic philosophy, beginning roughly in the sixteenth century and encompassing such intellectual movements as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation, continuing in the seventeenth with what is called the Age of Reason (early modern philosophy), and culminating in the eighteenth with the Enlightenment.

THE COGITO AND MODERNITY

Of course, all of the terms above are imprecise and disputed, but few will disagree that the work of René Descartes typifies early modern philosophy and sets the agenda for the philosophers who came after him. So the question of philosophical modernity – namely, how best to describe the reasons for the rise of modern philosophy and the waning of scholasticism – may be resolved by determining the break one wishes to depict between the work of Descartes and that of the scholastics.

Numerous elements in Descartes’s Meditations have been considered modern and contrasted with scholastic philosophy; these have included his use of radical skepticism and his appeal to the first-person perspective – that is, the cogito – as the first principle of knowledge. These modern elements are sometimes contrasted with what is thought to be a residual scholastic element in Descartes’s thought, namely his use of a causal principle to prove the existence of God.