1650 - 1750 CE Flashcards
Thomas Hobbes
1588 - 1679
Wrote Leviathan, which expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory.
Considered a founder of modern political philosophy.
Ralph Cudworth
1617 - 1688
Enlglish Anglican clergyman, classicist and philosopher.
An opponent of Hobbes’ political and philosophical views.
His magnum opus was his “The True Intellectual System of the Universe”.
Blaise Pascal
1623 - 1662
French polymath, child prodigy.
Made some great contributions to science.
Margaret Cavendish
1623 - 1673
Penned under her own name when most female writers chose to remain anonymous. One of the first examples of science fiction.
Wrote about gender, power, manners, scientific method and philosophy.
Rejected Aristotelianism and mechanical philosophy of the 17th century, preferring a vitalist model.
Early opponent of animal testing.
First woman invited to attend a meeting at the Royal Society of London where she engaged with Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes and Robert Boyle.
Helped disprove that women were inherently inferior to men.
Arnold Geulincx
1624 - 1669
Flemish philosopher, metaphysician and logician.
Follower of Rene Descartes.
Emphasised the powerlessness and ignorance of the human condition.
Pierre Nicole
1625 - 1695
One of the most distinguished Jansenists (a movement in catholicism that tried to reconcile free will with grace).
Robert Boyle
1627 - 1691
Anglo-Irish pioneer of the modern scientific method.
Made scientific contributions.
Devout Anglican and wrote about theology.
Anne Conway
1631 - 1679
English philosopher in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists was an influence on Leibniz.
Deeply original form of rationalist philosophy with hallmarks of gynocentric views.
Richard Cumberland
1631 - 1718
English philosopher and bishop.
Propounded utilitarianism.
Opposed egoistic ethics of Thomas Hobbes.
Baruch Spinoza
1632 - 1677
Dutch during its golden age with Portuguese-Jewish ancestry.
One of the foremost exponents of 17th century rationalism.
One of the early and seminal thinkers of the enlightenment and modern biblical criticism.
One of the most important and radical philosophers of the early modern period.
Shunned by his own family for religious concerns and his works were banned by the church.
His ideas encompassed metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of science.
John Locke
1632 - 1704
One of the most important enlightenment thinkers.
“The father of liberalism”.
Important in social contract theory.
Influenced Voltaire and Rousseau.
Influenced the American revolutionaries and his contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory can be seen in the declaration of independence.
Limited representative government, protection of basic rights and freedoms under the rule of law.
Theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self. Influenced Rousseau, Hume and Kant.
He was first to define self as a continuity of consciousness.
At birth the mind was a blank slate (tabula rasa). Born without innate ideas (in opposition to Cartesian ideas) and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience from sense perception.
“Whatever I write, as soon as I discover it not to be true, my hand shall be the forwardest to throw it into the fire”.
Joseph Glanvill
1636 - 1680
He predicted “to converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic conveyances may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence.”
Nicolas Malebranche
1638 - 1715
French rationalist philosopher who sought to synthesis Augustine and Descartes.
Best known for his doctrines of vision in God, occasionalism and ontologism.
Isaac Newton
1642 - 1726
Key figure in the enlightenment.
Established classical mechanics and calculus (with Leibniz).
Made contributions to optics.
Created the framework for physics for 300 years to follow.
Eradicated doubt about heliocentricity.
Motions of bodies on Earth and in the heavens are governed by the same forces (gravity).
President of the Royal Society.
Damaris Cudworth Masham
1659 - 1708
Proto-feminism - advocated for women’s eduction.
Friends and mutually influential with John Locke.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
1646 - 1716
German polymath influential in the history of both philosophy and mathematics.
Leading representative of 17th century rationalism and idealism.
Noted as an optimist. “our world is, in a qualified sense, the best possible world that God could have created”.
Grouped with Descartes and Spinoza as influential early modern rationalists.
Elements of scholastic tradition - some substantive knowledge of reality can be achieved by reasoning from first principles or prior definitions.
Anticipated modern logic and is still relevant today for analytic philosophy.
Jean Meslier
1664 - 1729
French Catholic priest who was discovered to have written a book about being an atheist denouncing all religions.
Giambattista Vico
1668 - 1744
One of the first counter-enlightenment figures in history. He criticised rationalism finding it unhelpful for human life.
An apologist for classical antiquity and the renaissance humanities.
“Truth itself is something made” - constructivist epistemology.
Magnus opus was Scienza Nuova which attempted to systematically organise the humanities into a single science that recorded and explained the historical cycles by which societies rise and fall.
Christian Wolff
1679 - 1754
The most significant German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant.
Peak of enlightenment rationality in Germany.
Founding father of economics and public administration as academy disciplines. Stressed the professional nature of university education.
George Berkeley
1685 - 1753
Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory called immaterialism/subjective idealism. This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are ideas perceived by the mind and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived.
Critique of abstraction which supported immaterialism.
Objects of sight are not material objects but rather light and colour.
Opposed by John Locke.
Argued against Isaac Newton’s doctrine of absolute space, time and motion. This was a precursor to Einstein.
Published a Christian apologetic against the free-thinkers and a critique of calculus.
Interest in his work increased after world war 2 because he tackled issues such as the problems of perception, primary/secondary qualities and the importance of language.
Montesquieu
1689 - 1755
French judge, man of letters, historian and political philosopher.
Theory of the separation of powers.
Coined the phrase despotism.
Anonymously published The Spirit of Law.
Influenced the founding fathers of the united states in drafting the US constitution.
Francis Hutcheson
1694 - 1746
One of the founding fathers of the Sottish Enlightenment.
Professor of moral philosophy at Glascow University.
Wrote A System of Moral Philosophy.
Influenced enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith.
Jonathon Edwards
1703 - 1758
American theologian.
Critical in shaping the first great awakening.
Enslaver and advocate of slavery.
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
1709 - 1751
One of the earliest French materialists of the enlightenment.
Wrote Man a Machine.
Took the position that humans are complex animals and no more have souls that other animals do.
Mind is part of the body.
Life should be lived so as to produce pleasure.
