(1685-1753)
“All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind,” was the view of George Berkeley, an Irish bishop and philosopher. He was an empiricist and is generally regarded as the founder of Idealism. [...]
(1711 - 1776)
The Scottish philosopher David Hume is one of the most brilliant and skeptical of philosophers. Our ideas of epistemology would have been very different had Hume not been born. He developed empiricist philosophy to its logical zenith and challenged traditional philosophical beliefs in such drastic a manner that the world was shocked. And [...]
(1632-1704)
One of the common things among Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz is that they are all rationalists. Rationalism is the system of thought, which believes in reason as a primary source of knowledge. A rationalist may also believe that man has certain innate ideas, which exist in his mind a priori, i.e. not derived from experience. [...]
(1646-1716)
The German philosopher Leibniz (also spelled as Leibnitz) was one of the greatest minds of all time. He is also known as the ‘Aristotle of the Seventeenth Century’ because he touched nearly every subject under the sun. His works cover a broad range of topics such as mathematics, philosophy, theology, law, diplomacy, politics, history, philology, [...]
In the universe presented by Spinoza, determinism prevails over everything and nothing can escape from the laws. Consequently, there is no free will [Not, at least, in the common sense view of ‘free will'] and no element of chance in the events of the world. We are as much bound by these laws as the [...]
(1632 - 1677)
“He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason,” proclaimed the Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza[1], and then proceeded to earn his own freedom. Spinoza is one of the greatest of the modern philosophers, and is remembered not only for his philosophy but also for the nobility of [...]
Part 1 Recap: Descartes begins by doubting everything, common sense, his senses, his logic, and wants to find out if anything survives this hyperbolic doubt. It turns out that there is one thing that he can’t doubt: the fact that he exists, because if he is doubting, it means that he exists. This was expressed [...]
(1596-1650)
“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties,” says Francis Bacon and thus begins Modern Philosophy. Given the background of centuries of dogmatic scholastic philosophy of saints, it is not surprising that the philosophers decided [...]
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
Thomas Hobbes was an English political philosopher, and one of the firsts to explain a state in purely secular terms. Leviathan is the most important of his works. Hobbes advocated a strictly materialistic point of view; he thought of humans as nothing more than sophisticated machines, whose functions and activities could be explained [...]
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Sir Francis Bacon was an English lawyer, statesman, essayist, historian, intellectual reformer, philosopher, and champion of modern science. Indeed, such broad is his area of interest that he claimed “all knowledge as his province”. Francis Bacon is in many ways the first great spokesman of the modern philosophy. He didn’t create any philosophical [...]
