AP Euro - 7.5 - The Age of Progress and Modernity

Positivism

• Taught that truth can only be known through science and math

• It was a threat to revealed religion since it went against the idea of beliefs and divine revelations

Relativism

all truth was relative

Modernism

The advances in science provided more knowledge but also uncertainty to the world

Irrationalism

Emphasized the irrational nature of the world and challenged Enlightenment ideas, advocating for focus on the ethereal human instinct called the spirit

Freidrich Nietschze (what did he believe?)

• Argued that reason was insignificant and that people were instead governed by their passions and base instincts

• Believed that Christianity was the great evil of modern humanity because it prioritized ethical obligation over creativity

• Claimed that God was killed by the Europeans of his age, allowing for the possibility of the liberation of humanity

Henri Bergson

• Argued that science was helpful for attaining practical knowledge of the world (e.g. germs cause disease)

• However, he also argued that reality could only be experienced intuitively, not analyzed scientifically

Sigmund Freud

• Argued that human behavior was based on the subconscious of the person which was shaped by the experiences of child

• Laid the groundwork for the field of psychology

Max Planck

• Discovered that atoms radiated heat not in constant flows but in erratic packets called quanta

• His quantum mechanics show that atoms behave irrationally and unpredictably