17th-century

philosophy

17th-century philosophy in the Western

world is generally regarded as being the
start of modern philosophy, and a
departure from the medieval approach,
especially Scholasticism.

Early 17th-century philosophy is often

called the Age of Reason or Age of
Rationalism and is considered to succeed
the Renaissance philosophy era and
precede the Age of Enlightenment.

Europe
In the West, 17th-century philosophy is
usually taken to start with the work of
René Descartes, who set much of the
agenda as well as much of the
methodology for those who came after
him. The period is typified in Europe by the
great system-builders — philosophers who
present unified systems of epistemology,
metaphysics, logic, and ethics, and often
politics and the physical sciences too.
Immanuel Kant classified his
predecessors into two schools: the
rationalists and the empiricists,[1] and
Early Modern Philosophy (as 17th- and
18th-century philosophy is known) is
sometimes characterized in terms of a
supposed conflict between these schools.
The three main rationalists are normally
taken to have been René Descartes,
Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz.
Building upon their English predecessor
Francis Bacon, the two main empiricists of
the 17th-century were Thomas Hobbes
and John Locke. The former were
distinguished by the belief that, in principle
(though not in practice), all knowledge can
be gained by the power of our reason
alone; the latter rejected this, believing that
all knowledge has to come through the
senses, from experience. Thus the
rationalists took mathematics as their
model for knowledge, and the empiricists
took the physical sciences. This emphasis
on epistemology is at the root of Kant's
distinction; looking at the various
philosophers in terms of their
metaphysical, moral, or linguistic theories,
they divide up very differently. Even
sticking to epistemology, though, the
distinction is shaky: for example, most of
the rationalists accepted that in practice
we had to rely on the sciences for
knowledge of the external world, and many
of them were involved in scientific
research; the empiricists, on the other
hand, generally accepted that a priori
knowledge was possible in the fields of
mathematics and logic.

This period also saw the birth of some of

the classics of political thought, especially
Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, and John
Locke's Two Treatises of Government.

List of 17th-century
philosophers
Francisco Suárez (1548–1617)
Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
Mir Damad (d. 1631)
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
Mulla Sadra (1571–1640)
Hugo Grotius (1583 -1645)
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655)
René Descartes (1596–1650)
Thomas Browne (1605–82)
John Milton (1608–1674)
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
John Locke (1632–1704)
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677)
Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715)
Isaac Newton (1642–1727)
 Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716)
Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659–
1708)
Mary Astell (1666–1731)
Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai (1689-1752)

See also
Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns

References
1. Historical Background of Kant

External links
EMPHASIS: Early Modern Philosophy
and the Scientific Imagination Seminar
 Early Modern Experimental Philosophy
Blog
A website containing about a hundred
texts from early modern philosophy,
slightly modified for easier reading

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