1600 – 1800 · 18 philosophers
The Early Modern Age
I think, therefore I am.
Seventeenth-century philosophers watched the new science being born and set out to relay the foundations of knowledge. Descartes began from universal doubt and found one point that could not be doubted: the thinking self. Spinoza and Leibniz followed the rationalist road, building systems with the rigour of geometry.
Across the Channel, Bacon and Locke insisted that all knowledge comes from experience. Berkeley took the road to its striking conclusion that to be is to be perceived, and Hume to its end: causation is only habit, the self only a bundle of perceptions. That conclusion woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber.
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment carried philosophy out of the study. Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau argued over religious toleration, the social contract and the state of nature. At the century's close Kant summed up: reason legislates for nature and for itself, and a person is an end, never merely a means.
Schools of this era
Philosophers of this era
Francis Bacon弗朗西斯·培根
'Knowledge is power': set out the programme of induction and experimental science, and proposed to rebuild all human knowledge.
Thomas Hobbes霍布斯
A thoroughgoing materialist who derived absolute sovereignty from a state of nature where life is 'nasty, brutish and short'; Leviathan begins modern political philosophy.
René Descartes笛卡尔
Father of modern philosophy, who found 'I think, therefore I am' through universal doubt, split mind from matter, and invented analytic geometry.
Blaise Pascal帕斯卡尔
Mathematical prodigy, co-founder of probability, defender of Jansenism; the Pensées ask, with the 'thinking reed' and the 'wager', where humanity stands amid the infinite.
Baruch Spinoza斯宾诺莎
The lens-grinder expelled by his synagogue, who proved by geometrical method that God is Nature and that freedom is the understanding of necessity.
John Locke洛克
Founder of empiricism and father of liberalism: the mind is a blank slate, and government rests on the consent of the governed.
Nicolas Malebranche马勒伯朗士
The Oratorian who fused Descartes with Augustine, holding that we see all things in God and that God is the only true cause.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz莱布尼茨
The last universal genius: inventor of calculus and binary arithmetic, author of the monadology and 'the best of all possible worlds', who dreamed of a universal language in which every dispute could be calculated.
George Berkeley贝克莱
'To be is to be perceived': matter does not exist, only minds and ideas, and God guarantees that things persist.
Montesquieu孟德斯鸠
The Spirit of the Laws proposed the separation of powers and tied political institutions to climate, custom and history, founding comparative politics.
Voltaire伏尔泰
The embodiment of the Enlightenment, who wielded wit against superstition, fanaticism and intolerance: 'crush the infamous thing'.
David Hume休谟
Took empiricism to its limit: causation is habit, the self a bundle of perceptions, reason the slave of the passions. Kant said he woke him from his dogmatic slumber.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau卢梭
'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains': civilisation corrupted us, the general will is the only legitimate sovereign, and the Enlightenment's rebel from within.
Denis Diderot狄德罗
Editor of the Encyclopédie, who spent twenty-five years gathering all knowledge into one work and explored every forbidden question in materialist essays and dialogue-novels.
Adam Smith亚当·斯密
A professor of moral philosophy who wrote The Wealth of Nations: sympathy shapes morality, an invisible hand coordinates markets, and economics became a science.
Immanuel Kant康德
The Copernican revolution of philosophy: objects conform to our forms of knowing, not knowledge to objects. Reason legislates for nature and for itself.
Condorcet孔多塞
The last of the Encyclopedists: mathematician, revolutionary, advocate of women's rights and abolition, who wrote the sketch of humanity's infinite progress while hiding from the guillotine.
Mary Wollstonecraft玛丽·沃斯通克拉夫特
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argued that women are not naturally weak but educated to be; reason has no sex, and women's rights are the Enlightenment's necessary conclusion.