Modern-Philosophy

Mary Wollstonecraft Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate for women’s rights, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is considered one of the founding texts of modern philosophical feminism. A contemporary of the American and French revolutions, Wollstonecraft applied Enlightenment principles of reason and equality to relations between the sexes, challenging the division between public and private spheres that excluded women from full citizenship. Key Concepts Rational Equality (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792): Her central argument — women and men share the same rational nature. If reason is the foundation of dignity and rights, as the Enlightenment thinkers hold, then women have the same entitlement to political and educational rights as men. The exclusion of women from the rational sphere is inconsistent with the very principles of the Enlightenment. ...

René Descartes Often called the “father of modern philosophy,” René Descartes was born in 1596 in La Haye, in the French region of Touraine, and was educated at the rigorous Jesuit college of La Flèche. Dissatisfied with bookish learning, he enlisted as a volunteer in the armies of the Thirty Years’ War; it was during this period, by his own account, that in 1619 he glimpsed a universal method capable of giving philosophy the same certainty as mathematics. He spent most of his productive life in the Dutch Republic and died in 1650 in Stockholm, where he had been invited to tutor Queen Christina of Sweden. He was also a great mathematician: analytic geometry and the coordinate system that bears his name are his creations. ...

Thomas Hobbes Born in England in 1588 — according to tradition prematurely, amid the panic over the threatened Spanish Armada, which led him to say that “fear and I were born twins” — Thomas Hobbes studied at Oxford and became tutor to the noble Cavendish family. In his travels through Europe, he engaged with the new science of Galileo and with the great philosophers of the continent. A witness to the bloody English Civil War, he went into exile in Paris for over a decade; it was there that he matured the political theory published in Leviathan (1651). He is the founder of modern state theory. ...