PHIL 211L - Modern Philosophy

3 Credit(s)

Liberal Arts
Modern Philosophy begins in the 17th century as a revolt against the centuries-long orthodoxy of Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas’s synthesis of Christianity and Aristotle. This course will study the new beginning that philosophers wanted to make. These philosophers fall into two groups. One is the Rationalists, whose main figures are Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz; the other is the Empiricists, whose main figures are Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Both groups are mainly concerned with the same problems: [1] The nature and source of knowledge and [2] the nature of reality. The answers they give, however, are very different. With regard to knowledge, the Rationalists argue that some ideas are innate and that certainty can be acquired only by means of reasoning on the basis of those ideas; information acquired through the senses is unreliable. As for reality, it is not the familiar world we perceive by means of our senses but a world known through reason. The Empiricists, by contrast, argue that the foundation of all knowledge is the information we acquire through the use of our senses; while they do not reject the validity of reason outright, they remain skeptical about its results. Although they believe in a reality independent of the human mind When they start out, near the end they reject that any such reality exists. The course concludes by giving a brief account of how Kant attempted to solve the legacy of problems bequeathed to him by these thinkers.

Offered When: Every three years.
Prerequisite(s): PHIL 101L