Modern Philosophy
Rationalism, empiricism, and the Enlightenment: from Descartes to Kant.
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A study of how Renaissance humanists recovered lost classical manuscripts and forged new philological, civic, and pedagogical methods that broke with medieval scholasticism and reshaped European learning.
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment's critique of tradition, superstition, and arbitrary authority, from Voltaire and Rousseau to the Scottish moralists, culminating in Kant's critical synthesis of the powers and limits of human reason.
Descartes's foundational quest for certainty and the rival rationalist systems of Spinoza and Leibniz that reworked his method into competing metaphysics of substance.
The empiricist tradition that grounded all knowledge in sense experience, tracing a line from Locke's theory of ideas through Berkeley's idealism to Hume's radical skepticism about causation and the self.
The new experimental method and institutional vision that Francis Bacon and his contemporaries forged as the foundation of modern natural science, from the critique of inherited "idols" of thought to Galileo's mathematized nature and Newton's new cosmic order.
The competing seventeenth-century accounts of the state of nature, natural rights, and political obligation, from Hobbes's absolutist Leviathan to Locke's theory of limited, consensual government, that founded modern liberal political philosophy.
The overlooked contributions of early modern women who engaged critically with Cartesian and Enlightenment philosophy from within and against its dominant systems.