Modern Philosophy
From Descartes (1637) to Hegel (1831). The age of epistemology — Rationalism, Empiricism, and the Kantian synthesis reshaped what we can know and how.
Sub-topics
The 17th-century school holding that reason, not sense experience, is the primary source of knowledge. Innate ideas exist. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz built grand metaphysical systems from pure thought.
The British school holding that all knowledge derives from sense experience. No innate ideas — the mind begins as a blank slate. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume pushed this principle to increasingly radical conclusions.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Synthesized Rationalism and Empiricism in the Critique of Pure Reason. Space, time, and causation are forms imposed by the mind. The categorical imperative in ethics. Changed everything.
The moral theory that the right action maximizes overall happiness. Founded by Bentham's felicific calculus and refined by Mill's qualitative distinctions. The most influential consequentialist ethics.
Post-Kantian movement (1780s-1830s). Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel sought to complete Kant's project by unifying subject and object, mind and world, in grand systematic philosophies of Spirit.