2005 Handbooks

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the central problems of modern philosophy first took shape against a background of seismic shifts in European civilization. With the rise of modern science, and the emergence of a new conception of how human beings are placed in nature, philosophers began to rethink the meaning of knowledge, reality, and the self. Does human knowledge rest on firm foundations? Or is there an uncertainty underlying all our beliefs? Is there a way of knowing which is deeper, or more authentic, than knowledge based on looking and seeing? Can the imagination deliver such knowledge? Or is there anything that reason alone can tell us about the nature of reality? And what, in general, are we entitled to call real? Is matter real? Is the self? Is God?

This unit considers how the great philosophers of the early modern period posed these questions, and the often surprising answers they gave. The philosophers we study include Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume and Berkeley. We also examine their considerable influence on contemporary thought.