Most Famous Early Modern Philosophers
Early modern philosophy denotes Western philosophical work from roughly the late sixteenth century through the late eighteenth century. The period is bracketed by the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, and it is dominated by debates over the foundations of knowledge, the nature of mind and matter, and political authority. The major rationalist and empiricist programs both belong to this era, including Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz on one side and Locke, Berkeley, Hume on the other. Kant's critical philosophy is typically taken to close the period. The era set the agenda for nearly all subsequent Western philosophy.
Philosophers in this tradition
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Rene Descartes
Rene Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist often called the father of modern philosophy. In the Meditations on First Philosophy he applied methodic do...
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Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza was a 17th-century Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent, regarded as one of the leading rationalists of the early modern period. His major work, the Eth...
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Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon was a 16th and early 17th-century English philosopher, statesman, and essayist, regarded as one of the founders of the modern scientific method and a major figure ...
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Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a 17th-century German polymath and one of the leading rationalist philosophers of the early modern period. He invented infinitesimal calculus indep...
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Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes was a 17th-century English philosopher whose 1651 book Leviathan is one of the founding texts of modern political philosophy and social contract theory. Writing du...
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Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and Christian philosopher who made foundational contributions to projective geometry, probability theory, and hydr...
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Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer, physicist, and philosopher of science whose work helped to inaugurate the scientific revolution. He improved the telescope and used it...
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Giambattista Vico
Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher of history, rhetorician, and jurist working in obscurity at Naples. Against the Cartesian privileging of mathematical natural scienc...
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Hugo Grotius
Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist and philosopher who is widely regarded as the founder of modern international law. Against the religious and dynastic justifications for war that...