Grand Strategy Annex

25th February 2012

Post with 1 note

The Scope of Modernity

The Scope of Modernity

What is modern? That depends on whom you ask.

Modern Man

If an anthropologist refers to “modern man,” he or she will likely mean the emergence of anatomically modern human beings about 120,000 years ago, or perhaps as recently as the advent of cognitive modernity, but still tens of thousands of years ago. 

Modern Logic

Almost every new development in logic has been called “modern” in its time. Those logicians of the European middle ages explicitly distinguished between the logica antiqua and the logica moderna, which was, essentially, logic before and after the rediscovery of the whole of Aristotle’s Organon in the West. But the dramatic developments in logic from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century — the developments that created the discipline of mathematical logic — are also called “modern logic.”

Modern Philosophy

If a philosopher refers to “modern philosophy” he or she will mean Western philosophy since Descartes.

Modern History

It has become common now to refer to “early modern history” as comprising the renaissance and the Reformation. Presumably, then, modern history proper begins with or after the Reformation. Foucault’s idiosyncratic labeling of the Enlightenment as “The Classical Age” suggests that another kind of modernity follows upon the lapse of this classicism (perhaps in the same spirit as “Après moi, le déluge”). 

Modern Science

It has become conventional to date modern science from approximately the early modern period — the work of Galileo, to be more specific — so that modern science and modern history are more or less coincident under this interpretation, but I imagine that there have been those who have called science since the innovations of relativity, quantum theory, and molecular biology “modern” science.

Modern Art

If an artist, musician, or art historian refers to “modern art,” he or she probably means the arts and music since the late nineteenth century, with the visual arts possibly dated to the Impressionists, and musical modernity possibly dated to Schoenberg.

Modern Society

If a sociologist or cultural historian refers to “modern society” he or she probably means social organization since the Industrial Revolution, or, perhaps only going back to the middle of the twentieth century — in any case, modern society is understood to have emerged some time within the past two hundred years.

Modern Fashion

Modern fashion might be dated with disingenuous precision to 1858 when Charles Worth established the first haute couture fashion house in Paris, though I suspect that when most people speak of modern fashion (if they ever do speak in these terms) they mean sometimes a little more recent, like the modern man’s fashion pictured here.

Tagged: modernmodernity