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Adelaide
08-03-2013, 04:04 PM
... the greatest achievements in modern history?

(modern history for the purpose of this discussion being defined as from the end of the middle ages, about 1450 CE, onward)

KC
08-03-2013, 04:33 PM
Generally, I would say the age of enlightenment which gave birth to liberalism and the scientific method.

However, if I have to get more specific I would say Gutenberg's movable type. Without that bold stroke* of genius the west could never have achieved some of it's greatest (or most terrible) accomplishments.







Edit: Technically I guess movable type precedes and is used as a marker of the modern era, but Gutenberg's Bible was finished in 1455 so I suppose it qualifies.



















*pun intended.

oceanloverOH
08-03-2013, 04:33 PM
I would say modern modern, as in our lifetimes (or thereabouts).....computer technology and the Internet.

KC
08-03-2013, 05:52 PM
I have argued before that Immanuel Kant would say we realized our greatest achievement (so far) in creating the United Nations, but that we still have far to go because we will never realize man's full potential until international law fully protects all states from external threats. I believe he would see the United Nations as a good first draft, but idealize something more like a global European Union.


Through war, through the taxing and never-ending accumulation of armament, through the want which any state, even in peacetime, must suffer internally, Nature forces them to make at first inadequate and tentative attempts; finally, after devastations, revolutions, and even complete exhaustion, she brings them to that which reason could have told them at the beginning and with far less sad experience, to wit, to step from the lawless condition of savages into a league of nations. In a league of nations, even the smallest state could expect security and justice, not from its own power and by its own decrees, but only from this great league of nations (Foedus Amphictyonum[3] (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/universal-history.htm#n3)), from a united power acting according to decisions reached under the laws of their united will.

Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View" (http://Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View)

Note: The link above redirects to a text from Marxists.org. The translation provided on that site is faithful to other translations I've read of Kant, however, and there doesn't seem to be a deliberate attempt to manipulate Kant's words in order to argue he belonged to an earlier stage of Marxist ideologies, except a little blurb discussing the similarities between the dialectic and Kant's ideas.

Mister D
08-03-2013, 05:56 PM
Yuck

Peter1469
08-03-2013, 07:50 PM
The creation of military grade gunpowder.

Common
08-03-2013, 08:38 PM
Indoor plumbing, can you even imagine having to hit the outhouse at 3am in 0 degree weather :)

Chris
08-03-2013, 08:48 PM
Generally, I would say the age of enlightenment which gave birth to liberalism and the scientific method.

...


Agree with that much anyhow and would add classical liberalism, free market, modern science...

http://i.snag.gy/zHlti.jpg

If you read Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, from which that chart is taken, you will find it was not just income but an improvement of every facet of life. Nothing much else made much difference.

Materially.

And now we're in the process of destroying that, leveling it out....skip the political....


Morally, I doubt man over recorded history has changed much at all.

Peter1469
08-04-2013, 09:33 AM
The creation of military grade gunpowder.


To expand on that: it ended the feudal era and started the modern nation state era.

Agravan
08-04-2013, 10:32 AM
Indoor plumbing, can you even imagine having to hit the outhouse at 3am in 0 degree weather :)Been there, done that :)

Dr. Who
08-04-2013, 12:18 PM
Louis Pasteur's work in germ theory.