Philosophy and the Modern Mind

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a period of daring innovation. Figures like Descartes and Galileo challenged the inheritance of antiquity. Figures like Leibniz and Berkeley challenged what passed for common sense. Figures like Spinoza and Hume challenged what was accepted as religion. In this class we will introduce students to the study of philosophy by exploring some of the philosophical projects these thinkers and some of their contemporaries pursued, and in that way trace the emergence of the modern philosophical sensibility.