Online research in philosophy

In this illuminating, highly engaging book, Jonathan Bennett acquaints us with the ideas of six great thinkers of the early modern period: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. For newcomers to the early modern scene, this lucidly written work is an excellent introduction. For those already familiar with the time period, this book offers insight into the great philosophers, treating them as colleagues, antagonists, students, and teachers.

The Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume 4 covers a period of three hundred and fifty years, from the middle of the fourteenth century to the early years of the eighteenth century and the birth of modern philosophy. The focus of this volume is on Renaissance philosophy and seventeenth-century rationalism, particularly that of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Science was ascendant during the Renaissance and beyond, and the Copernican revolution represented the philosophical climax of the middle ages. This volume is unique in its emphasis on the relationship between science and philosophy. Placing the philosophy of the age into its scientific, social and cultural context, it examines the scholastic thought which Renaissance philosophy both interacted with and reacted against. A grasp of the intellectual context of the rationalists is also critical to an understanding of this philosophical movement, and the writings of Bacon, Gassendi, Hobbes, and others are analyzed here. The Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume 4 provides a broad, scholarly introduction to this period for students of philosophy and related disciplines, as well as some original interpretations of these authors. It will be important reading both for the specialist and the general reader. It includes a glossary of over one hundred technical terms and a chronological table of philosophical, scientific, and other cultural events.

Philosophers are often asked for their views on the "meaning of the times." But how should philosophy deal with world events? And what makes a philosopher more qualified than anyone else to editorialize in the daily paper? In this book, Descombes's intention is not to offer his own reading of the signs of the times, but to interrogate modern philosophers about how they come up with the barometers they use to tell us about modern reason and the spirit of the times. For Descombes, a "philosophical discourse of modernity" should be rejected, for the true subject of modernity belongs not to philosophers, but to writers, moralists, and sociologists of individualism.

The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy is a comprehensive introduction to the central topics and changing shape of philosophical inquiry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It explores one of the most innovative periods in the history of Western philosophy, extending from Montaigne, Bacon and Descartes through Hume and Kant. During this period, philosophers initiated and responded to major intellectual developments in natural science, religion, and politics, transforming in the process concepts and doctrines inherited from ancient and medieval philosophy. In this Companion, leading specialists examine early modern treatments of the methodological and conceptual foundations of natural science, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, logic and language, moral and political philosophy, and theology. A final chapter looks forward to the philosophy of the Enlightenment. This will be an invaluable guide for all who are interested in the philosophical thought of the early modern period.

Early modern philosophers looked for inspiration to the later ancient thinkers when they rebelled against the dominant Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. The impact of the Hellenistic philosophers (principally the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics) on such philosophers as Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Locke was profound and is ripe for reassessment. This collection of new essays offers precisely that. Leading historians of philosophy explore the connections between Hellenistic and early modern philosophy in ways that take advantage of new scholarly and philosophical advances. The essays display a challenging range of methods and will be an invaluable point of reference for philosophers, historians of ideas and classicists.

Offered here is the first comprehensive treatment in English of the philosophical system of the seventeenth century philosopher Pierre Gassendi. Gassendi's importance is widely recognized and is essential for understanding early modern philosophers and scientists such as Locke, Leibniz and Newton. Offering a systematic overview of his contributions, LoLordo situates Gassendi's views within the context of sixteenth and early seventeenth century natural philosophy as represented by a variety of intellectual traditions, including scholastic Aristotelianism, Renaissance Neo-Platonism, and the emerging mechanical philosophy. LoLordo's work will be essential reading for historians of early modern philosophy and science.

Disc 1. Philosophy and the modern age ; Scholasticism and the scientific revolution -- Disc 2. The rationalism and dualism of Descartes ; Locke's empiricism, Berkeley's idealism -- Disc 3. Neo-Aristotelians : Spinoza and Leibniz ; The Enlightenment and Rousseau -- Disc 4. The radical skepticism of Hume ; Kant's Copernican revolution -- Disc 5. Kant and the religion of reason ; The French Revolution and German idealism -- Disc 6. Hegel, the last great system ; Hegel and the English century -- Disc 7. The economic revolution and its critic, Marx ; Kierkegaard's Critique of reason -- Disc 8. Nietzsche's Critique of morality and truth ; Freud, Weber, and the mind of modernity -- Disc 9. Rise of 20th-century philosophy, pragmatism ; analysis -- Disc 10. Rise of 20th-century philosophy, phenomenology ; Physics, positivism and early Wittgenstein -- Disc 11. Emergence and Whitehead ; Dewey's American naturalism -- Disc 12. Heidegger's Being and time ; Existentialism and the Frankfurt School -- Disc 13. Heidegger's turn against humanism ; Culture, hermeneutics, and structuralism -- Disc 14. Wittgenstein's turn to ordinary language ; Quine and the end of positivism -- Disc 15. New philosophies of science ; Derrida's deconstruction of philosophy -- Disc 16. The challenge of postmodernism ; Rorty and the end of philosophy -- Disc 17. Rediscovering the premodern ; Pragmatic realism, reforming the modern -- Disc 18. The reemergence of emergence ; Philosophy's death greatly exaggerated.

The Divide between the prominence of final causes in Aristotelian natural philosophy and the rejection or severe limitation of final causation as an acceptable explanation of the natural world by figures such as Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza during the seventeenth century has been considered a distinguishing mark between pre-modern and modern science.1 Admittedly, proponents of the mechanical and corpuscular philosophies of the seventeenth century were not necessarily stark opponents of teleology. Pierre Gassendi and Robert Boyle endorsed teleology, Leibniz embraced entelechies, and they creep into Descartes's natural philosophy, despite his adamant attempts to eliminate them.2 Nonetheless, critiques of ends in ..

For decades Continental theorists from Derrida to Deleuze have engaged in provocative, penetrating, and often extensive examinations of modern philosophers-studies that have opened up new ways to think about figures such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant. This volume, for the first time, gives this work its due. A systematic rereading of early modern philosophers in the light of recent Continental philosophy, it exposes overlooked but critical aspects of sixteenth- through eighteenth-century philosophy even as it brings to light certain historical assumptions that have colored-and distorted-our understanding of modernist thought. This volume thus retrieves modern thinkers from the modernistic ways in which they have been portrayed since the nineteenth century at the same time, it enhances our view of the roots and concerns of current Continental thought. What claims does the early modern period have on contemporary philosophy? How have recent theorists engaged this material, and why? In answer, some of these essays explore how major Continental theorists such as Derrida, Deleuze, Le Doeuff, Irigaray, Kristeva, and Althusser explicate the ideas of classical modern thinkers others draw on recent Continental insights to examine the doctrines of modern philosophers beginning with Machiavelli and ending with Kant. Together they show how current Continental theory reinvigorates the study of the history of modern philosophers by transforming not only how we interpret their answers to certain questions, but also how we understand the very nature of these questions.

This is a collection of new, specially written essays on the flowering of modern philosophy on the continent of Europe. The eight leading contributors focus on the work of Descartes, later Cartesians, Leibniz, and Bayle, reassessing the influence of Augustine on Descartes and of the Reformed tradition on Leibniz, and tracing anticipations of Leibniz's monadology in the cabbalistic notions of van Helmont, the preformationist theories of Malebranche, and the experimental work of Dutch microscopists.