History of Modern Western Philosophy I: Rationalism, Empiricism and Kant

PHIL

214

History of Modern Western Philosophy I: Rationalism, Empiricism and Kant

History of Modern Western Philosophy I: Rationalism, Empiricism, and Kant surveys the key writings of seminal western philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, including works by Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and G. W. Leibniz (the so-called Continental Rationalists); Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume (the so-called British Empiricists); and Immanuel Kant, whose epic synthesis of the two competing traditions closes the era. Starting from the great questions that moved the age (What can we know? What is mind? What is matter? Is there free will? Does God exist?), the course situates the philosophical responses within the new conceptions of science, religion, politics and morals which emerge in the early modern period and focuses on epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and metaphysics (the theory of the ultimate nature of being).

Fall, Spring

Undergraduate

Yes

019856