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Modern Philosophy: fun facts and quiz
The essentials in 7 ideas, with fun facts, an illustrated story and a quiz to see how much you know.
The essentials
The Enlightenment
In the 1700s, Enlightenment thinkers championed reason, science and individual rights. Kant summed it up in two words: “Dare to know!”
Key fact
Enlightenment ideas inspired the American and French Revolutions.
John Locke
John Locke argued that people have natural rights to life, liberty and property, and that governments exist to protect them.
Key fact
Locke described the newborn mind as a “blank slate”.
David Hume
Scottish philosopher David Hume asked how we know the future will be like the past. The sun rising every day doesn’t strictly prove it will rise tomorrow.
Key fact
This puzzle is called the problem of induction.
Mill on Liberty
In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill argued that people should be free to do as they wish, unless they harm others.
Key fact
This idea is known as the harm principle.
Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche challenged traditional morality and urged people to create their own values. His famous line “God is dead” described a cultural shift, not a news report.
Key fact
He also wrote: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
Existentialism
Existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir said we aren’t born with a fixed purpose: we create meaning through our choices.
Key fact
Sartre’s slogan: “Existence precedes essence.”
The Mind Puzzle
How does a physical brain produce thoughts and feelings? Philosophers call it the “hard problem” of consciousness, and it’s still unsolved.
Key fact
Philosopher David Chalmers coined the term in 1995.
Fun facts
Diderot’s Encyclopédie, an attempt to gather all knowledge in dozens of volumes, was banned by French authorities in 1759.
Locke’s ideas echo in the US Declaration of Independence: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
Hume said his first big book “fell dead-born from the press”. Today it’s a classic.
As an MP in 1867, Mill proposed giving women the vote. He lost, but 73 MPs backed him.
Nietzsche became a professor at the University of Basel aged just 24, before he’d finished his doctorate.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, from 1949, became a founding text of modern feminism.
Philosophers imagine “zombies” that act exactly like us but feel nothing inside, to ask what consciousness adds.
Story: Greek at Three
Greek at Three
London, 1809. John Stuart Mill’s father starts teaching him ancient Greek. He’s three. By his teens, he has read more than most professors.
At 20, he sinks into a deep depression. He realises he’s been trained to think, but never to feel.
Poetry, especially Wordsworth’s, pulled him out. He went on to write On Liberty, shaped by the ideas of his wife, Harriet Taylor.
True or false?
Tap your answer to see if you got it, and why.
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Question 1 of 10
The Enlightenment championed reason and rights.
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True. Over tradition and blind authority.
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Question 2 of 10
Locke argued that people have natural rights.
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True. Life, liberty and property.
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Question 3 of 10
Hume raised the problem of induction.
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True. How can past patterns justify predictions?
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Question 4 of 10
Mill’s harm principle limits freedom only to prevent harm to others.
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True. Otherwise, people should be free.
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Question 5 of 10
Nietzsche urged people to create their own values.
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True. Rather than inherit them unquestioned.
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Question 6 of 10
Existentialists say we create meaning through our choices.
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True. Freedom comes with responsibility.
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Question 7 of 10
How the brain produces experience is still debated.
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True. One of philosophy’s biggest open questions.
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Question 8 of 10
The Enlightenment took place in the 1300s.
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False. In the 1700s.
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Question 9 of 10
Locke said governments should have unlimited power.
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False. He said they exist to protect rights.
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Question 10 of 10
Hume proved the future must be like the past.
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False. He questioned how we could ever prove it.
Keep going in the app
KnowSoda learns what you know and brings back what you’re about to forget. Modern Philosophy has 6 more ideas at the Advanced and Expert levels.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, existentialism
- Immanuel Kant (1784), “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”
- John Stuart Mill (1859), On Liberty
- David Chalmers (1995), “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”, Journal of Consciousness Studies
- Nobel Prize — Literature 1964 (Jean-Paul Sartre, declined)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Spinoza, Rousseau, Wittgenstein, pragmatism, Marx, Arendt
