PHIL 202
History of Modern Philosophy Spring 2014
Division II
This is not the current course catalog

European philosophy in 17th and 18th centuries both responded to, and shaped in its turn, major revolutions in scientific and political thought. The legacy of this intellectually fertile period is still felt in contemporary epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy. We will consider some of the questions that are both central to the modern era and philosophically important today: What are the origins, nature and limits of human knowledge? How should scientific inquiry proceed? What is the nature of reality, and how can it be known? What is the relationship between the mind and the body? How should we think about causality in the material world, and how about causality that involves persons as agents? Are we free or determined? Are there compelling reasons to be moral? What is the nature of moral thinking and acting? How can our social and political institutions be explained and justified? We will read a necessarily limited selection of writings by the most important thinkers of the modern period: Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume, Reid, Rousseau and Kant.