Creators of the Modern Mind

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reviews Anthony Gottlieb’s discussion of six philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whose stature and influence are especially great: Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume. Gottlieb emphasizes throughout that these men lived in a historical period dominated by dramatic developments and conflicts in three areas—science, religion, and politics—and that their thoughts and writings were dominated by the need to respond to those developments, and to understand the relations among them. First, there was the scientific revolution, which introduced a new way of understanding the physical world through universal laws, mathematically formulated, that govern everything that happens in space and time. Second, after the Reformation and the terrible wars of religion it had become clear that the plurality of religious beliefs in Christendom was not going to disappear. Third, the basis of legitimate political authority was coming seriously into question, with skepticism about the divine right of kings and support for the right of subjects to overthrow a ruler who abused his power. Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Hume all produced theories of political authority starting from the subject’s rather than the ruler’s point of view.