Origins of Reason: 17th and 18th Century Philosophy

Catalog description

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, commonly referred to as “Modern Philosophy,” was a period of dramatic upheaval, revolution, and discovery in philosophy and science. This course aims to illuminate exactly how the shift from the dominant scholastic philosophy, mostly based on Aristotelian thought, to the “modern” philosophy happened and what types of consequences this shift had for us. To do this, we will look at many of the prominent thinkers of the day, which may include: René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Baruch Spinoza, Blaise Pascal, Mary Shepherd, Elizabeth of Bohemia, David Hume, Anne Conway, George Berkeley, among others. Many questions that dominated intellectual debate during those years will be discussed, such as: the nature of God, the reality/import of perception, ethics, the foundation of science, and the nature of human knowledge.