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From Premodern To Modern American Jurisprudence: The Onset Of Positivism, Stephen M. Feldman

Stephen M. Feldman

This article explains the crucial differences between premodernism and modernism. A distinctive feature of premodernism was an abiding faith in nature or God as a stable and foundational source of meaning and value. When premodernism gave way to modernism, the commitment to foundationalism remained intact. Modernists believed that knowledge must be firmly grounded on an objective foundation. A crucial distinction between modernism and premodernism, however, lay in their respective ideas of foundations. Whereas premodernists readily accepted God and nature as foundational sources for value and knowledge, modernists rejected religious, natural, and other traditional footings and searched for some alternative foundation. …