Are we modern?

The word "modern" is used in many different contexts in many different ways. For some people modernisation was synonymous with industrialisation. For others the modern world was the world of modern art and music. If we listen to the news we also hear people frequently talking about the need for developing societies to modernise, refering to things like an increasing respect for human rights, democracy and the privatisation of the economy. There is another aspect of modernity, which is often overlooked but which is equally revolutionary. This concerns the foundations of knowledge. Before the emergence of a more modern sensibility knowledge wasn't much of a problem. Nobody bothered to write books about the foundations of knowledge. The assumption was that they were obvious. For medieval Europeans the great edifice of human learning rested upon the very solid foundation of revealed Truth. In practice, what this meant was that certain books were authoritative and unquestionable sources of knowledge, and if you wanted to come up with some new idea you had to explain how it agreed with the ideas in those sacred texts, and if you couldn't do that you risked being arrested by the thought police and then being thrown out of the Church - what they called "excommunication" - which would mean the loss of your job and income, and so you would die a lonely, impoverished and miserable man. In 1632 a book was published by the Frenchman Rene Descartes that undermined these older ideas about the foundations of knowledge. It was also the first of the huge number of books about knowledge that have been written in our epoch - and the first book in a whole new branch of learning: epistemology.