Welcome to “Modernity”!  Or at least “early Modernity”.  That greeting presents the theme for this semester and next.  But what is, or was, "Modernity"?  What does it or did it mean to be a modern man"?  What are, or were the religious, artistic, and cultural characteristics of "Modernity"?

Over the course of this semester we will consider the scientific naturalism of Francis Bacon, the philosophic rationalism of Rene Descartes, and the epistemological sensationalism of John Locke, all of which will lead us to the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. We will read plays by Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Wolfgang von Goethe as well as the poetry of John Milton, John Donne and Alexander Pope. We will view master works of visual art and music.

As with most cultural periodizations, such a definition of the category terms "modern" and "modernity" commit acts of reductive violence to the variety of historical experience: modernity as the "age of reason" or the "culture of the Enlightenment" might be defined as naturalist, rationalist, and skeptic but how then can we account for the humanism of Montaigne or the mysticism of Pascal?  Are they not equally “Modern”? 

Note then, our study and discussions will be question driven. In asking all of the questions enumerated, we will really be considering what Maynard Mack termed "the depiction of what it means to function as a genuinely humane and human being.”  It is in coming to understand this depiction that we will be able not only to answer not that first question -- " what is, or was, Modernity? -- but to truly make the tradition our own, to adopt or reject its ideas and values.