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

Baruch Spinoza 1632 – 1677 · Dutch
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...
Francis Bacon 1561 – 1626 · English
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 ...
Thomas Hobbes 1588 – 1679 · English
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...
Gottfried Leibniz 1646 – 1716 · German
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...
Rene Descartes 1596 – 1650 · French
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...
Joseph Glanvill 1636 – 1680 · English
Joseph Glanvill was an English clergyman, philosopher, and an early Fellow of the Royal Society. After studies at Oxford he served as a country parson in Somerset and as chaplai...
Robert Boyle 1627 – 1691 · Anglo-Irish
Robert Boyle was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, and theologian and one of the founders of the Royal Society. His Sceptical Chymist helped to transform alchemy into...
Blaise Pascal 1623 – 1662 · French
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and Christian philosopher who made foundational contributions to projective geometry, probability theory, and hydr...
Galileo Galilei 1564 – 1642 · Italian
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...
Mary Astell 1666 – 1731 · English
Mary Astell was an English philosopher and one of the first advocates in English of the equal education of women. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies she argued for the founding...
Comenius 1592 – 1670 · Czech
Jan Amos Komensky, known in Latin as Comenius, was a Czech bishop of the Unity of the Brethren, philosopher, theologian, and the principal architect of modern educational though...
John Toland 1670 – 1722 · Irish
John Toland was an Irish-born freethinker, political pamphleteer, and one of the most controversial English-language philosophers of the early Enlightenment. Educated at Glasgow...
Isaac Newton 1642 – 1727 · English
Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher whose Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy laid the foundation ...
Nicolas Malebranche 1638 – 1715 · French
Nicolas Malebranche was a French Oratorian priest and one of the most original Cartesian philosophers of the seventeenth century. His Search After Truth combined Descartes' rati...
Henry More 1614 – 1687 · English
Henry More was an English philosopher and one of the foremost Cambridge Platonists. A fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, for nearly half a century, he defended the immateria...
Madeleine de Scudery 1607 – 1701 · French
Madeleine de Scudery was a French novelist, salonniere, and philosopher of the seventeenth century, the most widely read living writer of her age in any language and the central...
Margaret Cavendish 1623 – 1673 · English
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was an English philosopher, poet, and prose writer and the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society. Working in the thick o...
Margaret Fell 1614 – 1702 · English
Margaret Fell was an English philosopher, religious organizer, and the principal early architect of the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, alongside her second husband G...
Giambattista Vico 1668 – 1744 · Italian
Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher of history, rhetorician, and jurist working in obscurity at Naples. Against the Cartesian privileging of mathematical natural scienc...
Hugo Grotius 1583 – 1645 · Dutch
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...
Ralph Cudworth 1617 – 1688 · English
Ralph Cudworth was an English philosopher, theologian, and the leading figure of the Cambridge Platonist school. As Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, he produced The True...
Bathsua Makin c. 1600 – c. 1675 · English
Bathsua Makin was an English educator, philosopher, and the most learned woman of her age in early modern England, tutor to the daughters of Charles I and the author of the most...
Anthony Collins 1676 – 1729 · English
Anthony Collins was an English freethinker, philosopher, and friend and disciple of John Locke in his last years. Independently wealthy and educated at Cambridge, he wrote a ser...
Pierre Gassendi 1592 – 1655 · French
Pierre Gassendi was a French Catholic priest, astronomer, and philosopher and one of the leading anti-Aristotelian voices of seventeenth-century thought. He observed the transit...
Samuel Clarke 1675 – 1729 · English
Samuel Clarke was an English Anglican clergyman and philosopher of religion, a close associate of Newton and the foremost rationalist theologian of his age. His Boyle Lectures o...
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz 1648 – 1695 · Mexican
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was a Mexican Hieronymite nun and the foremost writer of the Spanish Baroque. Self-taught and celebrated as a child prodigy, she chose the convent over...
Anna Maria van Schurman 1607 – 1678 · Dutch
Anna Maria van Schurman was a Dutch polymath, painter, and philosopher, widely celebrated in seventeenth-century Europe as the most learned woman of her age. Her Whether a Chris...
Anne Conway 1631 – 1679 · English
Anne Conway was an English philosopher and one of the most original metaphysicians of the seventeenth century. Largely confined to her family estate by chronic and debilitating ...
Antoine Arnauld 1612 – 1694 · French
Antoine Arnauld was a French Catholic theologian, logician, and philosopher and the leading figure of the Jansenist movement at Port-Royal. With Pierre Nicole he produced the Po...
Catharine Trotter Cockburn 1679 – 1749 · English
Catharine Trotter Cockburn was an English moral philosopher, essayist, and dramatist and one of the most accomplished women philosophers of the early eighteenth century. After e...
Cesare Cremonini 1550 – 1631 · Italian
Cesare Cremonini was an Italian philosopher, professor at the University of Padua for more than forty years, and the most prominent academic Aristotelian of his age. A friend an...
Damaris Cudworth Masham 1659 – 1708 · English
Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham, was an English philosopher and one of the most accomplished women thinkers of the late seventeenth century. The daughter of the Cambridge Platonis...
Emilie du Chatelet 1706 – 1749 · French
Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Chatelet, was a French Enlightenment philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. The translator and commentator on Newton's...
Gabrielle Suchon 1632 – 1703 · French
Gabrielle Suchon was a French philosopher and one of the most original feminist political philosophers of the Grand Siecle, who escaped the Dominican convent into which her fami...
Lord Bolingbroke 1678 – 1751 · English
Henry St. John, first Viscount Bolingbroke, was an English Tory statesman, political philosopher, and one of the most influential public writers of his generation. Secretary of ...
Marin Mersenne 1588 – 1648 · French
Marin Mersenne was a French Minim friar, mathematician, and philosopher and the central node of the European scientific correspondence of the first half of the seventeenth centu...
Richard Cumberland 1631 – 1718 · English
Richard Cumberland was an English moral and political philosopher, mathematician, and from 1691 Anglican bishop of Peterborough. His major philosophical work, De Legibus Naturae...
Samuel Pufendorf 1632 – 1694 · German
Samuel Pufendorf was a German jurist, political philosopher, and historian, the principal continental developer of the natural-law tradition that ran from Grotius to Locke. The ...
William Wollaston 1659 – 1724 · English
William Wollaston was an English Anglican priest, philosopher, and one of the leading early Enlightenment moralists. He spent the last decades of his life as a private scholar i...