Modern Philosophy

John Locke John Locke was born in Wrington, England, in 1632, was educated at Oxford, and practiced medicine before becoming secretary and physician to the Earl of Shaftesbury, which brought him into the orbit of high English politics. Caught up in the struggles between Parliament and the absolutist Stuart crown, he went into exile in Holland during the reign of James II and returned only in 1689, with the Glorious Revolution, which enshrined the parliamentary order he would help to justify philosophically. He is regarded as the father of classical liberalism and one of the greatest influences on empiricism and modern political thought. ...

Joseph Maréchal was a Belgian Jesuit philosopher and psychologist, founder of Transcendental Thomism — a movement that undertook a synthesis between Thomistic metaphysics and Kant’s critical philosophy. His work marks a decisive moment in the renewal of Scholasticism in the 20th century and exerted profound influence on figures such as Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan. Key Concepts The Starting Point of Metaphysics (Le Point de départ de la Métaphysique, 5 notebooks, 1922–1947): His principal work. Maréchal traces the history of epistemology — from Greek philosophy through Kantianism — to ground Thomistic metaphysics in the face of Kantian critique. Notebook V (“Thomism Confronting Critical Philosophy”) is the most discussed. ...

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. ...