The Rise of Modern Philosophy: The Tension Between the New and Traditional Philosophies from Machiavelli to Leibniz

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Clarendon Press, 1993 - 352 pages
"Modern" philosophy in the West is said to have begun with Bacon and Descartes. Their methodological and metaphysical writings, in conjunction with the discoveries that marked the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, are supposed to have interred both Aristotelian and scholastic science and the philosophy that supported it. But did the new or "modern" philosophy effect a complete break with what preceded it? Were Bacon and Descartes untainted by scholastic influences? The theme of this book is that the new and traditional philosophies have much more in common than the orthodox account suggests. The contributors consider not only modernity in metaphysics and the sciences but also the claims of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza to have invented "modern" ethics and politics. These two aspects of "modernity" in philosophy are connected for the first time. The book offers a broad view of the early modern philosophers, covering not only the much-studied major figures but also relatively neglected writers: Mersenne, Gassendi, White, and Sergeant.
 

Contents

Scepticism and Modernity
15
The Vitality and Importance of Early Modern
33
Modern Scholastic or Renaissance
63
Francis Bacon Authority and the Moderns
71
The Debate over
89
The Compromise
107
A New Start? Cartesian Metaphysics and the Emergence
145
Descartes and Some Cartesians
167
Philosopher?
213
Locke Sergeant and Scientific Method
231
The Question of Machiavellis Modernity
253
Morals and Modernity in Descartes
273
Spinoza the Stoic
289
Ancient and Modern
317
Index
337
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About the author (1993)

Tom Sorell is at Essex University.

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