The Thinkers : Early Modern

"A renowned philosopher was held in high regard by his driver, who listened in awe as his boss lectured and answered difficult questions about the nature of things and the meaning of life, " Swara went on about the thinkers discussion, when she arrived after invoking Basmalah and greeting with Salaam.

"Then, one day," Swara carried on, "the driver approached the philosopher and asked if he was willing to switch roles for just one evening. The philosopher agreed, and, for a while, the driver handled himself remarkably well in a meeting at a famous university.

However, when the time came for questions, someone at the back of the room asked him, 'Is the epistemological meta-narrative that you seem to espouse compatible with a teleological account of the universe?'

'That's an extremely simple question,' he replied. 'So simple, in fact, that even my driver could answer it. So, I want to test my driver to explain it to you,' while signaling to 'his driver,' to explain it.'"

"Perhaps, we've heard that there is a saying that goes, ‘Don’t learn the tricks of the trade, learn the trade’, but some ‘tricks’ are very important to thinkers. The conceptions of life and the world which we call 'philosophical' are a product of two factors: one, inherited religious and ethical conceptions; the other, the sort of investigation which may be called 'scientific', using this word in its broadest sense,

Philosophy—according to Bertrand russel—is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge—so I should contend—belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy.

Philosophy tries to get to the bottom of things by asking questions and proposing answers, At the bottom of science, for example, are questions like, “What are the aims of the sciences?”; “What is scientific method and why is it so successful?”; “What is a scientific law?”; “What is time?”; and so on. Scientists generally don’t stop to consider “at-the-bottom” questions like these since they are too busy working on science itself. They can get along by accepting, implicitly or explicitly, certain views without questioning them. Thinking about questions at the bottom of things and developing systematic accounts of the foundations of science is left to the philosophers of science.

The word philosophy means 'love of wisdom.' Indeed, it is a love of wisdom that guides philosophers to explore the fundamental questions about who we are and why we’re here. On the surface, philosophy is a social science. But it is so much more than that. Philosophy touches on every subject you could possibly think of. It’s not just a bunch of old Greek guys asking each other questions over and over again (though it has its fair share of that as well). Philosophy has very real applications; from the ethical questions raised in government policy to the logic forms required in computer programming, everything has its roots in philosophy.

Through philosophy, we are able to explore concepts like the meaning of life, knowledge, morality, reality, the existence of God, consciousness, politics, religion, economics, art, linguistics philosophy has no bounds!

In a very broad sense, there are six major themes philosophy touches on: Metaphysics: The study of the universe and reality; Logic: How to create a valid argument; Epistemology: The study of knowledge and how we acquire knowledge; Aesthetics: The study of art and beauty;

Politics: The study of political rights, government, and the role of citizens; Ethics: The study of morality and how one should live his life.

Thinking rationally involves the deployment of the right philosophical tool at the right time, be it Ockham’s Razor, Hume’s Fork or some other device from the thinker’s toolbox. The most enduring contributions of the great philosophers are the thinking tools, methods and approaches they invent or discover, which often outlive the theories and systems they construct or those that they use their tools to dismantle.

According to Bertrand Russell, Philosophy—or actually Western Philosophy—as distinct from theology, began in Greece in the sixth century B.C. After running its course in antiquity, it was again submerged by theology as Christianity rose and Rome fell. Its second great period, from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, was dominated by the Catholic Church, except for a few great rebels, such as the Emperor Frederick II (1195–1250). Modern philosophy begins with Descartes, whose fundamental certainty is the existence of himself and his thoughts, from which the external world is to be inferred.

But before we dig into the Early Modern Philosophers—in brief, according to our contributors, remember?—let me tell you that—according to Ben-Ami Scharfstein—there are three great philosophical traditions, the Indian, the Chinese, and the European. Philosophical tradition is a chain of persons who relate their thought to that of their predecessors and in this way, form a continuous transmission from one generation to the next, from teacher to disciple to disciple's disciple. Or rather, because a whole tradition is made up of many subtraditions, it is one and the same tradition, because all of its subtraditions share common sources and modes of thought and develop by reaction to one another. A tradition is by nature, cumulative, and it progresses in the sense that it defines itself with increasing detail and density. The tradition—according to Scharfstein—as philosophical to the extent that its members articulate it in the form of principles, if only principles of interpretationand of conclusions, reasonably drawn from them; and—as Scharfstein define it—as philosophical to the extent that its adherents defend and attack by means of reasonable argumentseven those that deny reasonand understand and explain how they try to be reasonable. As history demonstrates again and again, no philosophy is purely rational, pure rationality being an unreasonable, impossible ideal. Matters of religion, communal loyalty, reverence for teachers, and cultural habits, not to mention individual psychology, have always limited rationality, so that philosophical subtraditions or schools are rational by tendency rather than in any absolute way.

Why then, are there only three philosophical traditions, the Indian, the Chinese, and the European? What about such others as the Jewish, Muslim, Japanese, and Tibetan? Well, yes and no, as philosophers say, these are and are not separate traditions. The matter is more complicated than it seems at first. To begin with, it is possible to argue that even the Indians, Chinese, and Europeans never arrived at points of view unified enough to justify classifying them as distinct traditions. In all three, there are obvious and unobvious points of cleavage. To mention only the most obvious, in India, the Indians who regarded themselves as orthodox tried to delegitimize, that is, read out of their tradition, the philosophies they classified as unorthodox; in China, the Taoists mocked the tradition that Confucians revered, and during China's later history, orthodox Confucians saw Buddhism as deeply foreign to Chinese tradition; and in Europe, it is not hard to distinguish the different national traditionsphilosophy that is a French, English, German, Italian, or other tradition.

Philosophy, it turns out, had just three territorial origins, three beginning languages, three historical pasts, and three webs of self-reference. And it is best to study the Three Traditions together rather than separately or successively.

So, let's digging in! Our contributors mention some names of Early Modern Philosophers, i.e. Desiderius Erasmus, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, George Berkeley and Voltaire.

Desiderius Erasmus, c.1466/69–1536, was an important humanist Dutch scholar and a voice of moderation during the bitter disputes of the Reformation. In his most famous work, Stultitiae Laus or Moriae Encomium [In Praise of Folly], he satirized the ills of the day. Desiderius Erasmus was the illegitimate son of a priest and a physician’s daughter. Orphaned at an early age, he and his brother went to school at Deventer, which became the cradle of Dutch humanism. Erasmus was pressured by his guardian to enter the Augustinian priory of Steyn, and was ordained in 1492. He had no vocation for the monastic life, but it allowed him at least to pursue his studies of ancient classical literature.

While at Steyn, Erasmus became emotionally involved with a fellow monk, Servatius. He also wrote his first treatises, which would not be published until many years later.

In 1493, a chance to escape the monastery arose when the bishop of Cambrai took Erasmus into his service. An eagerly anticipated trip to Italy did not materialize, but the bishop allowed him to complete his studies in Paris, at the Collège de Montaigu. However, this was also disappointing, as the place was still dominated by the Scholastic form of learning, which emphasized tradition and dogma and which Erasmus loathed.

Erasmus’s Latin translation of the New Testament was used as the standard version of the text until the 19th century, and several of his other works also found success: Adagia (1500), a collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, became a bestseller, while his Colloquies (1519) was published in dozens of editions. Most famous of all was In Praise of Folly, which Erasmus wrote to amuse Thomas More, when he arrived in England in 1509.

Sir Thomas More, the lawyer, statesman, and renowned humanist (1478–1535) was Erasmus’s closest friend in England. Erasmus dedicated In Praise of Folly to him, and the title is a pun on his name. (Its Latin form is Moriae Encomium, which could also be translated as 'In Praise of More.') Both men admired the satires of Lucian, and More himself wrote the famous satirical work Utopia (1516). Unlike Erasmus, however, More became dangerously involved in politics. He served for a time as Henry VIII’s lord chancellor, but his refusal to acknowledge the Act of Supremacy—the bill that made the king head of the Church of England—led him to be convicted of treason and beheaded in May 1535.

Erasmus produced the first version in a week, but expanded the text considerably before publishing it 2 years later. In the book, which was modeled on the satires by the 2nd-century classical author Lucian, Erasmus mocked a wide range of contemporary targets through the personification of Folly. She was a goddess of his invention, the daughter of Wealth and Youth, attended to by the nymphs Ignorance and Drunkenness. Some of the humor was light-hearted, jesting about gamblers and cuckolds, but Erasmus also aired more serious criticisms about Scholastic monks and theologians.

Erasmus was writing at a dangerous time, when the obvious divisions of the Reformation were becoming more acute, so the notion of using Folly as a mouthpiece for his criticisms was both prudent and inspired. Erasmus’s own views were probably closer to those of the Protestant reformers—he favored a personal relationship with God via the Scriptures rather than through the organized ritual practices of the Church—but he was cautious enough to condemn the more extreme views of Martin Luther in print.

Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469–1527, was an Italian statesman, philosopher, historian, and playwright, but is best known for his adroitness as a ruthless political theorist, epitomized by his masterpiece, Il Principe [The Prince], which still retains its power to shock.

Machiavelli was born in Florence, the son of an attorney. His family appear to have had a noble ancestry, but they were poor. Virtually nothing is known of his early years, and his life only comes into sharp focus in 1498, when he became a clerk in the second chancery of the Florentine Republic. At that point, the city of Florence was in crisis. The rule of the Medici had ended after the French invasion of 1494, and the turbulent regime of the firebrand preacher Girolamo Savonarola was drawing to a close. Stability returned only with the election of Piero Soderini as ruler in 1502.

With Soderini in power in Florence, Machiavelli gained in status and, even though he never reached the top rank of diplomats, he was involved in several key missions. He was sent to visit Cesare Borgia, apparently to check if he was plotting against Florence, and in 1503, he was dispatched to Rome to gauge the capabilities of the new pope, Julius II.

In 1512, a political twist brought about the end of the Republic and the return of the Medici. Machiavelli was dismissed from his duties, tortured, and briefly imprisoned. After his release, he was exiled to San Casciano, just outside Florence, where he soon became bored, missing the excitement of political life. To fill his time, he began to write. He penned comic plays—which were very popular during his lifetime—and histories. He also wrote three texts that related more to his working life—The Prince, Discourses on Livy, and The Art of War.

The Prince—the most notorious of Machiavelli’s works—was not published in his lifetime, the first edition appearing in 1532. The book took the form of a treatise advising an imaginary prince how best to govern. There was nothing new about texts of this kind (they dated back to antiquity), but instead of the usual catalog of princely virtues, Machiavelli preached a political morality that was based entirely on expediency rather than on conventional ethics. His prince should not 'flinch from being blamed for vices which are necessary for safeguarding the state.' Sometimes meanness was better than generosity, cruelty more effective than mercy, and breaking faith more beneficial than honesty. Machiavelli’s emphasis on realpolitik earned him scorn in some quarters, but he has since been hailed as the father of modern political philosophy.

Michel de Montaigne, 1533–1592, in a time of religious intolerance and strife, brought a spirit of skeptical inquiry and self-questioning to the exploration of knowledge, and a search for meaning to the minutiae of his own life.

Michel de Montaigne grew up during a period of intense sectarian division. By the time he reached adulthood, the Reformation was underway and northern Europe was split between Catholic and Protestant factions vying for power. In an age of murderous antagonisms, his was a voice of reason and forbearance. As a writer, he pioneered the essay form, a genre that would prove enduringly popular across Europe and beyond as a medium for expressing complex ideas.

He was born Michel Eyquem de Montaigne to a wealthy and wellconnected family in the Bordeaux region of southwest France. (Another branch of the family would later be responsible for developing the celebrated Chateau d’Yquem wines.) Michel, however, chose to be known simply as Michel de Montaigne, the name of the family estate 30 miles (50km) east of the city, which his father had served as mayor. His mother was descended from Sephardic Jews who had emigrated from Spain and converted to Roman Catholicism.

Montaigne’s France was divided along religious lines between Protestant Huguenots and those loyal to the Catholic Church. Montaigne himself stayed in the latter camp, but also maintained good relations with the Protestants and their leader, Henry of Navarre. When the warring factions clashed on the edge of his own estate, he tried to act as a mediator, dealing directly both with Navarre and with Catherine de Medici, mother of the Catholic king Henry III. On one occasion, he went on a secret mission to the king in Paris, bearing a message from Henry of Navarre. The deputation came to nothing, but Montaigne paid a price for his efforts when he was briefly imprisoned in the Bastille by Catholic extremists fearful of his contacts with the Protestant leader.

Montaigne received an extraordinary education. For the first year or two of his life, he was sent to live with a local peasant family to link him to the common people. When he eventually returned home, he was put in the care of a tutor who brought him up in an entirely Latin speaking environment; he was 6 years old before he learned to speak French. In other respects, his father treated him kindly, giving orders that he should be woken up every morning to the sound of a lute. Montaigne’s eccentric childhood no doubt influenced his own ideas on education. He was strongly opposed to the notion of rote learning, believing instead that knowledge should be acquired through a dialogue between teacher and pupil. He thought that learning should be a pleasure, not a pain, and need not come through books alone. Above all, it should go with the grain of the child’s personality, for 'there is no one who, if he listens to himself, does not find a pattern all his own, a ruling pattern, that struggles against education.'

By the age of 23, Montaigne had qualified to serve as a magistrate, and based himself in Bordeaux for almost the entirety of his legal career. His job had a political dimension that sometimes took him to the royal court in Paris, yet it failed to catch his imagination or fulfill his ambitions.

In 1571, at the age of 38, he made the momentous decision to retire to his estate to pursue his studies and to write. He was led to do so partly by the death of his father 2 years earlier, which left him master of the estate, but also by the passing of his dearest friend, the poet Etienne de La Boétie, who had worked with him in the parlement (judicial council) of Bordeaux. By this time, Montaigne had published his first work—a translation of a Spanish theological tome entrusted to him by his father.

Over the next 9 years, Montaigne worked on his Essais, in the process creating an entirely new literary form—the essai. In the sense that he used the word, an essai was an inner exploration—an attempt to probe his own thoughts on a given subject. His first Essais were short and full of allusions and quotations; he was particularly drawn to the Stoic philosophers, notably Seneca, as well as to the biographer Plutarch. Soon though, he proved eager to challenge received opinions, not least his own. The result was an approach of a very individual kind: skeptical, inquiring, humane, and surprisingly modern to today’s readers. His self-doubt expressed itself strikingly in his personal motto: Que Sçay-je? (What Do I Know?)

Montaigne’s guiding principle was the injunction to 'Know thyself,' and he used the essay format to draw an intimate portrait of the inner workings of his own mind. In doing so, he provided his readers with what some commentators regard as an entirely new concept of the self.

Rather than presenting a consolidated version of the self, Montaigne chose to emphasize its inconsistencies, claiming that 'We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.' For him, instead of a single, immutable identity, there was a fluid persona that could be fleetingly captured in prose through rigorous self-analysis but never permanently pinned down.

The first edition of the Essays was published in 1580. The book was well received, and Montaigne traveled to Paris to present a copy to France’s Henry III. He then set off with his family on a year’s journey through Germany, Switzerland, and Austria to Italy, partly in search of a cure for his ailment. He was summoned back unexpectedly 15 months later by news that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux. He returned to France to serve two terms of 2 years each in the post a poisoned chalice for a man who cherished his independence and calm. A worsening political situation made the task even harder: before his second term was up, he had to face a threatened coup by the extreme Catholic faction in the city.

The last years of Montaigne’s life were troubled by renewed civil war in France, accompanied by an outbreak of plague. He continued to revise and expand the Essays, bringing out an enlarged edition in 1588. Meanwhile, his health was deteriorating. Another attack of kidney stones brought on a throat infection as a side effect that gradually suffocated him. He died in his chateau—surrounded by family, friends, and servants—in September 1592 at the age of 59.

Montaigne’s reputation continued to grow after his death. In England, Francis Bacon’s Essays, published in 1597, were written very much in the manner of Montaigne; in 1603, the English scholar John Florio published a translation of Montaigne’s Essays that made an impression on Florio’s acquaintance, the English playwright William Shakespeare.

In later centuries, writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche, expressed admiration for Montaigne’s work. Few thinkers, in fact, have inspired so much personal affection, a common theme of their admiration being well expressed by Emerson, 'It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience.'

Francis Bacon, 1561–1626, was a controversial English statesman, lawyer, and literary figure. Above all, he is hailed as the father of empiricism whose methodology formed the basis of modern scientific inquiry. Bacon was born in London in 1561 and grew up around the court of Elizabeth I. Poor health plagued his life, and he was educated privately at home until the age of 12, when he was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge. He briefly studied law at Gray’s Inn, but interrupted his studies to travel through France and Italy with the English ambassador in Paris. Upon his return to England, he qualified as a barrister in 1582.

Bacon was a member of parliament from 1584, but it was not until the accession of James I in 1603—the year in which Bacon was knighted—that his career soared: he became solicitor-general; keeper of the royal seal; and, in 1618, lord chancellor. He was a spendthrift and often in debt, despite his status. Considered to be a ruthlessly ambitious and scheming politician who sought favor with the king to advance himself, Bacon attracted enemies. In 1621, he was made viscount of St. Albans, but in the same year he was convicted of accepting a bribe, imprisoned briefly, and fined a substantial amount. After this scandal, Bacon immersed himself in science. Moving away from the Renaissance preoccupation with reviving the achievements of the ancients, he was the first philosopher to develop a post-Aristotelian method of empirical investigation—and it is for this that he is remembered.

Bacon’s best-known works are The Advancement of Learning (1605), which discusses the state of scientific knowledge at the time, obstacles to progress, and his ideas for revitalizing secondary and further education; and his seminal text, Novum Organum (1620). It was here that he set out his ideas of a scientific method based on inductive reasoning. In keeping with the spirit of the modern age, Bacon wanted to acquire new forms of knowledge that could be used to improve the quality of human life, and to create new technologies, subsidized by the state, using strictly scientific methods grounded in observation and experiment, rather than simply in logical deduction. He reworked these ideas in fictional form in his utopian novel The New Atlantis.

Dari mitos kuno zaman keemasan asli dan ciptaan religius

mitos seperti Taman Eden, melalui teks mani Thomas More Utopia (1516), hingga saat ini, setiap budaya telah menawarkan imajiner versi masyarakat ideal. Utopia Bacon muncul dalam novelnya yang belum selesai The New Atlantis (1624). Itu adalah dunia yang didasarkan pada peningkatan ilmiah progresif yang ditetapkan di pulau mitos Bensalem di lembaga penelitian Rumah Salomon yang disponsori negara. Karya tersebut merupakan ekspresi yang jelas dari gagasan filosofis Bacon dalam bentuk fiksi.

Bacon’s life was surrounded by controversy and rumor: some claimed he had an affair with Marguerite de Valois, the sister of the French king, while others said he was homosexual. There was speculation that Bacon was the illegitimate son of Elizabeth I and even that he was the real author of some of Shakespeare’s plays. Bacon’s death was no less bizarre. He succumbed to bronchitis after stuffing a chicken with snow in an experiment to test the preservation of bodies. Some suggested that he faked his own death, a story that was never substantiated. It is undisputed, however, that many of the giants of philosophy, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume, were influenced by Bacon. He remains a key figure in scientific methodology, one of the first thinkers to integrate scientific and philosophical reasoning, and a founder of modern science.

Thomas Hobbes, 1588–1679, is best known for the political philosophy of Leviathan. An English pessimistic materialist, he believed that only authoritarian government could save humans from the dire consequences of their own nature. Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588, the year that Elizabethan England was threatened with invasion by the Spanish Armada. He later wrote that his mother 'was filled with such fear that she brought twins to birth, myself and fear at the same time.' Whether or not it was determined at the moment of his birth, Hobbes certainly grew up with a strong fear of war and a desire for stability. His own family provided an example of the damage caused by disorder. His father was a minor cleric serving at a country parish near Malmesbury, Wiltshire. In 1603, Hobbes senior was found guilty of verbal abuse and physical assault against a fellow clergyman and disappeared from Malmesbury and from Hobbes’s life. Hobbes then came under the protection of an uncle, who funded his education. Hobbes showed precocious intelligence. Educated in the classics by a scholar in Malmesbury, he produced a translation of Euripedes’ Greek drama Medea into Latin at the age of 14. Shortly afterward, he was admitted to the university at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. He was not impressed by the university, developing an abiding aversion to Aristotle, whose works were regarded at Oxford as the sole source of authority in philosophy and the natural sciences. According to his first biographer, John Aubrey, Hobbes was 'even in his youth … temperate both as to wine and women.' He did not fit in with other students, whom he later described as 'debauched to drunkenness, wantonness, gaming, and other vices.'

It may have been his reputation for good morals that earned Hobbes the breakthrough that changed his life. In 1608, aged only 20, he was appointed as tutor to the 18-year-old William Cavendish. The Cavendish family were wealthy aristocrats, possessing the dukedoms of Devonshire and Newcastle and owning the great country houses of Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth. They became his patrons for the rest of his life. Through this association, he was introduced to men of learning, including Francis Bacon. Hobbes also traveled, staying for long periods in Europe with his pupil, William, and later with other Cavendish offspring in need of a tutor.

In the 1630s, Hobbes developed his general philosophical views, largely influenced by the physical sciences and mathematics. Inspired by the work of the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid on geometry, he adopted a method based on deduction from a few initial axioms. He was also guided by contemporary European thinkers engaged in what would later be called the Scientific Revolution. The French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Gassendi became a close acquaintance, and Hobbes also met the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei.

A major influence on Hobbes, the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy, in 1564. While teaching at Pisa and Padua universities, he investigated such phenomena as gravity, velocity, and relativity using the experimental method. Turning to astronomy, he developed a telescope with which he identified the moons of Jupiter. Denying that the Earth was the center of the universe brought him into conflict with the Catholic Church. Condemned by the Inquisition, in 1633, he was forced to publicly recant his views. He died in 1642. It was under Galileo’s influence that Hobbes became convinced there was nothing in the universe but physical matter in motion. 'Every part of the universe is body,' he wrote, 'and that which is not body is no part of the universe.'

He rejected the concept of any 'incorporeal substance' such as mind or soul as an absurd contradiction. Thoughts were a motion in the brain. This radical materialism would bring Hobbes into conflict, not only with the religious authorities, but also with his great contemporary René Descartes, whom he met in Paris in the 1640s. Descartes wrote, in response to Hobbes, that asserting thoughts could be matter in motion was as ridiculous as saying the earth was the sky.

Hobbes’s political philosophy grew in response to the turbulent events of his time. The Stuart kings, rulers of England from 1603, faced opposition from parliament, which sought to limit the powers of the monarch. In 1628, when parliament issued a Petition of Rights in protest against alleged abuses of royal authority, Hobbes published a translation of the work of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides that he intended as a criticism of democracy. By the time Hobbes’s treatise The Elements of Law appeared in May 1640, confrontation between Charles I and parliament had become acute. At the height of his intellectual powers, he produced the most complete statement of his philosophy in Leviathan (1651). Leviathan links Hobbes’s materialist view of human beings to a vision of society and government.

The restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1661 brought Hobbes a pension, but not the security he craved. Despite royal protection, he was threatened by parliament with prosecution for upholding atheism, an allegation he denied. He escaped legal action, but was no longer able to publish potentially controversial works such as Behemoth, his study of the origins of the English Civil War. In his final years, he returned to his love of the Greek classics, translating the Iliad and Odyssey into English. Hobbes died in 1679, aged 91. His final words were, 'I am about to take a great leap in the dark.'

René Descartes, 1596–1650, the 'father of modern philosophy,' was a groundbreaking French mathematician and scientist. He founded the rationalist tradition, believing the use of reason was the key to knowledge of the world. Descartes was, by his own account, a somewhat sickly child. He later wrote that he had inherited from his mother 'a dry cough and a pale complexion, which stayed with me until I was more than 20,' causing pessimistic doctors to predict an early death. In the tradition of his family, he was destined for a career as a lawyer and, eventually, entry into parlement like his father. At the age of 11, he was sent to the newly founded La Flèche college, a prestigious school patronized by the French king Henri IV and run by the Jesuits. There, for 8 years, he received a rigorous education in Aristotelian philosophy, Latin, Greek, and a little mathematics. After a further year at the University of Poitiers, he was qualified to begin a career in law. However, he had become deeply dissatisfied with his education. 'I found myself so overcome by doubts and errors,' he later wrote, 'I seemed to have gained nothing from studying, apart from becoming gradually more conscious of my ignorance.' Disillusioned with books, he resolved to travel and garner experiences, learning from observation of 'what could be found in myself or the great book of the world.'

For a young man of Descartes’ status, the obvious alternative to a career in law was employment as an army officer. During travels that lasted 10 years, he served in the armies of the United Provinces (the Netherlands) and of Bavaria. He seems to have seen little action, although he may have been present in the Bavarian ranks at the battle of White Mountain near Prague in 1620. After his return to France in 1627, Descartes participated in the siege of La Rochelle, an episode of France’s ugly civil conflict between the Catholic authorities and the Protestant Huguenots. He never took his military career seriously, and at the age of 23, he embarked on the intellectual project that was to occupy the rest of his life.

On military service in Bavaria in November 1619, Descartes experienced a kind of revelation. Sleeping in a stove room on a freezing cold night, he had a series of dreams that, he claimed, showed him the path he should follow in life. He awoke convinced that he must seek a solid ground for truth through inner reflection, building on the logic of 'clear and certain arguments.' Through the 1620s, Descartes felt his way toward what he called 'a completely new science' in which all questions would be solved by 'a general method.' Through a friendship with Dutch scholar Isaac Beeckman, he had been introduced to sophisticated mathematics. While developing original ideas on geometry that were among his most important work, he sought to formulate a way of applying the same form of rigorous thinking found in mathematics to all areas of philosophy and science.

Descartes was almost as influential a mathematician as a philosopher. He was an innovator in the application of algebra to geometry and in the use of coordinates—determining the position of a point by its relation to two fixed lines. Cartesian coordinates, as they are called, are still essential tools for astronomers, engineers, physicists, and designers of computer graphics today. Descartes first published his ideas on geometry as an addendum to Discourse on Method in 1637.

From 1629, Descartes based himself in the United Provinces, because the Netherlands was the only place in mainland Europe where freedom of thought was broadly respected. An inheritance allowed him to live without material concerns, and so devote himself to his writings. Itinerant by nature, he resided in a variety of different towns around the country and never married. He did, however, have a daughter, Francine, by a Dutch servant, Helena Jans van der Strom, in 1635. It is recorded that when the child died of scarlet fever at the age of 5, Descartes wept. He later provided Helena with a dowry so she could marry the son of an innkeeper.

Through the 1630s, Descartes attempted nothing less than a complete description of the universe and humans’ place in it. Le Monde [The World], completed by 1633, covered such topics as the nature of heat, light, and matter; the Copernican heliocentric view of the solar system; and the operation of the senses. Some of its science was misguided—denying the existence of a vacuum required Descartes to invent 'vortices' to explain the movement of the planets and comets, a theory that would hold sway in France long after the English scientist Isaac Newton had provided the correct explanation.

However, Le Monde offered an impressive mechanistic vision of the natural world as composed purely of matter in motion. Around the same time, Descartes wrote L'Homme (Man), which inserted humans into this scheme. Chiefly a study in physiology, it describes the bodies of humans and animals functioning as sophisticated automata—machines analogous to clocks or mills—with physical causality creating the illusion of voluntary self-controlled action. But humans, Descartes argued, also have a 'rational soul' of a different nonphysical nature, 'joined and united' with the body.

Neither of Descartes’ treatises was published. Even though he presented them as 'fables' about a hypothetical world and a hypothetical man, this could not disguise their radical divergence from established religious doctrine. The persecution of the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei by the Inquisition in 1633 showed that such revolutionary ideas were not acceptable to the Catholic Church. Protestants were equally hostile to any hint of atheism—even though Descartes was always careful to allot God a necessary place in his universe. Eventually, he prudently chose to publish three less controversial sections of Le Monde, on geometry, optics, and meteorology, with an explanatory preface, Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method).

Along with Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy)—published 4 years later, and which elaborates the same arguments—Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method) proved to be Descartes’ most durable contribution to philosophy. Using a method that was to become known as Cartesian Doubt ('Cartesian' is the adjective from Descartes), he applied systematic skepticism to his beliefs in search of a certainty—something that he could not doubt and that must be true. The publication of Discours and Meditationes made Descartes a renowned thinker. Twice, in 1647 and 1648, he emerged from his solitude to visit Paris—and it was here that he encountered the French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal, among many others.

In 1649, Descartes published his treatise Les passions de l'âme (Passions of the Soul), dedicated to Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680), the granddaughter of England’s James I. Educated in science, theology, and mathematics, at the age of 24, Elizabeth began a correspondence with Descartes in which she challenged his theory of mind–body dualism, questioning how a 'thinking substance' could act on matter to make a body move. Their letters, which displayed the warmth of close friendship, continued until Descartes' death in 1650. In later life, Elizabeth became abbess of a Lutheran monastery at Herford in Germany.

In the meantime, his writings had attracted the attention of the culturally ambitious Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689), one of the most extraordinary women of her age. Succeeding to the Swedish throne at the age of 6, she developed a wide range of cultural and intellectual interests. Inviting Descartes to Stockholm was part of a project to make her court 'the Athens of the north.' In 1654, having converted to Catholicism, she abdicated the throne and moved to Rome.

Descartes succumbed to a fever in February 1650, dying at the age of 54. His last words were reportedly, 'My soul, you have been held captive a long time. This is the time for you to leave the prison and to relinquish the burden of this body.'

Blaise Pascal, 1623–1662, a man of extraordinary talent in fields from mathematics to practical invention. However, the central focus of his life was his spiritual quest, which he described memorably in his unique prose style. Already religiously minded, Pascal had an intense supernatural experience that lasted for around 2 hours on the evening of November 23, 1654. It was to transform his life, redirecting his thoughts to spiritual matters. Pascal wrote down the revelation on a scrap of paper. Beginning 'Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace …,' the account suggests a very personal illumination. For the rest of his life, Pascal kept the paper sewed into the lining of his coat, where it was eventually discovered after his death.

Blaise Pascal was born in ClermontFerrand, central France, in 1623. A child prodigy, Blaise published a work on projective geometry at the age of 17, but he also had practical skills, evident in his development of the Pascaline. This device is now regarded by some as the world’s first digital calculator. The machine was designed in 1642 to calculate addition and subtraction. The device won Pascal fame in his life, but it could not be mass-produced.

Baruch Spinoza, 1632–1677, condemned in his day as a heretic and a freethinker, has come to be seen as a champion of intellectual integrity, fighting all forms of dogmatism and seeking a firm rational foundation for religion and ethics. Baruch Spinoza—who later took to Latinizing his Hebrew first name as Benedictus—was born in Amsterdam to a wealthy Jewish family. From his youth, Spinoza showed an intense intellectual curiosity that expressed itself in many forms. He was deeply versed in Hebraic monotheism, but equally immersed in the new philosophy of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes—contemporaries of his, though of an earlier generation.

Spinoza’s most enduring work was in the field of ethics, where he examined how individuals can best adapt their lives to the totality of existence. He set out his position in the first part of his Ethica (or, in full, Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order)). Spinoza argued that the acceptance of his monist view—that all is One and that One is what we know as God—has moral implications. The last two sections of the Ethica are entitled 'Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions' (Somerset Maugham would later borrow the first phrase as the title of a famous novel) and 'Of the Power of the Understanding, or of Human Freedom.' In these sections of the text, he argued that freedom lies in expanding intellectual comprehension, which brings us closer to God.

John Locke, 1632–1704, his works formed the basis of political liberalism and philosophical empiricism and influenced everything from the American Constitution to the thinking of Berkeley and Hume. Born in Wrington, Somerset, England, John Locke grew up in turbulent times. The English Civil War broke out when he was 10 years old, and in 1649, the king, Charles I, was beheaded and England became a republic under Oliver Cromwell. From 1675 to 1679, while living in France, Locke worked on what would become one of his most famous texts, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he set out his ideas on the mind and on knowledge. Rejecting the position of rationalists such as Descartes, he argued that humans are not born with innate knowledge, but that understanding is acquired through direct experience—a view known as empiricism.

On his return from France, Locke composed his major political work, Two Treatises of Government (1689). In it, he argued against absolute monarchy and also set out his ideas on the social contract, the will of the majority, the equality of human beings, and the duties and limits of legitimate government. At this time, the English royal succession was in turmoil, with the Whigs (a major political faction) rejecting the idea of a Catholic king. Suspected conspiracies led to arrests and executions, and in 1681, Shaftesbury, a Whig leader, fled to Holland; sensibly, Locke followed in 1683. During 5 years of exile, he continued work on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and wrote Letter Concerning Toleration, which contained his thoughts on the importance of religious tolerance. Locke returned to England in 1689, a year after the Glorious Revolution that deposed the Catholic James II and installed the Protestant William of Orange on the throne. In his final years, Locke lived at the house of Lady Masham, in Essex, where he entertained various friends, including Isaac Newton, and continued to write about politics, philosophy, economics, religion, and education.

Gottfried Leibniz 1646–1716, has been called 'the Aristotle of the modern world.' As a thinker, he sought to bridge the gap between the God-centered world of the Scholastics and the rationalism of the Scientific Revolution. Leibniz’s precocity and his academic background pointed to a future as a thinker and teacher, but he rejected such a career on the grounds that 'my thoughts were turned in an entirely different direction.'

Leibniz was able to travel on diplomatic missions: in Paris, he soon became acquainted with the philosophers Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas Malebranche and the mathematician Christiaan Huygens, and on a later mission to London, he met the scientists and advocates of experimentation Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle.

Leibniz was one of the great innovators, coming up with the discovery of calculus independently of Isaac Newton, who was working on the problem at the same time. Although Newton may have had precedence in formulating some of the key ideas, Leibniz was the first to publish on the subject, and some of his notations are used to this day. He is also credited with the invention of mathematical logic.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1651–1695, Mexican scholar, poet, playwright, and nun, Sor (Sister) Juana devoted her life to philosophical and scientific study and the production of a stream of literary works. In recent years, she has been adopted as a feminist icon. Born Juana de Asbaje y Ramírez in San Miguel Nepantla, a hamlet southeast of Mexico City, Juana was a child prodigy. She learned to read at the age of 3, and by the time she was 8, she had composed a poem in honor of the Holy Sacrament. In 1660, she moved to live with her grandfather in Mexico City, where she is said to have learned Latin in just 20 lessons.

Sor Juana assembled a library said to have contained 4,000 volumes and wrote the lyrical poems and plays on which her reputation rests. Her thoughts on gender and the relations between the sexes have proved of particular interest to modern feminists. In this respect, one of her most admired texts is her Respuesta a Sor Filotea (Reply to Sister Filotea), written in response to the bishop of Puebla, who had chosen that female pseudonym to criticize Sor Juana’s secular pursuits. In response, she argued that there is nothing whatsoever in Scripture that prohibits the education of women and that learning can only enhance their understanding of the sacred texts. Nevertheless, the Church authorities took a critical view of her activities, and the archbishop of Mexico—an opponent of plays and playhouses—accused her of waywardness. Perhaps as a result of this pressure, Sor Juana decided to give up all her worldly interests, signing a document of penance in her own blood and selling all her books and scientific instruments to give the money to the poor. She died in 1695 in an epidemic of the plague, which she caught while ministering to infected sisters in the convent.

George Berkeley, 1685–1753, an Irish churchman and philosopher. He proposed the concept of subjective idealism, maintaining that it is only in the act of perception that material objects exist. He was born in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1685, and grew up in the grounds of Dysart Castle, where the family home lay. He was appointed dean of Derry in 1724 and then bishop of Cloyne in County Cork 10 years later. Much of Berkeley’s most original philosophical work was completed in Dublin by the time he was 28. An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, his first significant text, was published in 1709, when he was just 24.

In 1728, he traveled to the US with his newlywed wife and bought an estate in Rhode Island. By 1731, it was clear that funds from the British government would not be forthcoming, and Berkeley returned to London. A major beneficiary of his visit was Yale University, founded 30 years earlier, to which he left his library and his house. Berkeley then spent 3 more years in London before receiving the appointment to Cloyne. He lived there for the next 18 years, moving with his family to Oxford only in 1752 to oversee his son George’s matriculation into the university. He died in Oxford the following year, and is buried in the city’s Christ Church Cathedral.

François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778, known by his pen-name Voltaire, a key figure in the rationalist Enlightenment era, was one of the founders of the modern liberal tradition, committed to freedom of thought and expression and critical of the authority of religion and the state. He was born into the Parisian elite in 1694 and educated by Jesuits at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand. Instead of following his father into the legal profession, he chose to become a writer.

Published in 1734, Voltaire’s Letters on the English expressed admiration for religious dissidents, Locke’s evidence-based theory of knowledge, and science freed from constraint by religious dogma. Denounced for its anti-Catholicism, the book was banned and burned in Paris. Voltaire escaped punishment by living in the French provinces with his mistress, the Marquise du Châtelet, who helped him produce Elements of Newton’s Philosophy (1738), a work that did much to spread the Newtonian view of the universe in France.

Emilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) was a French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. She translated Newton’s Principia into French, including a commentary containing her own innovative ideas. Her treatise Foundations of Physics (1740) was a notable contribution to the philosophy of science. Voltaire’s mistress for 15 years, she was in effect a co-author of his Elements of the Philosophy of Newton. In 1748, she took a younger lover, and in the following year, she died in childbirth.

Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique, published in 1764, brought the ideas of tolerance, freedom of speech, and deism to a wider public. In his later years, Voltaire settled at Ferney in southeast France, with his young niece Madame Denis as his mistress. By the time of his death in 1778, his fame as a fiction writer, dramatist, and campaigner against injustice was immense. By corroding respect for the authority of the Church and State among educated French people, his thinking and writing contributed to the upheaval of the French Revolution in 1789.

There are still many, which can be mentioned include: Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yanming; The Spanish Catholic philosopher and theologian Francisco de Vitoria; Giordano Bruno, mystic whose heretical opinions led to his execution; Francisco Suárez, a philosopher in the scholastic tradition of Thomas Aquinas; Muslim philosopher and theologian Sadr ad-Din Muhammad Shirazi, known as Mulla Sadrā; Hugo Grotius, known as the 'Father of International Law; French philosopher and scientist Pierre Gassendi, the first astronomer to observe the transit of Mercury across the Sun; Wang Fuzhi, the last major philosopher of Ming dynasty China; Margaret Cavendish, a self-taught, benefiting from an educated aristocratic environment offering plentiful access to books; Anne Conway, sometimes referred to as 'the first English feminist'; Nicolas Malebranche, a Catholic philosopher; Mary Astell, best known for her advocacy of equal educational opportunities for women and is often hailed as one of England’s first feminist philosophers; Giambattista Vico, a key thinker on the philosophical foundations of history and the humanities; Hakuin Ekaku, Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher; Enlightenment political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu; and French Materialist philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie."

"As different periods threw up different economic, social, scientific, and political questions," Swara added, "so the topics that consumed the most philosophical energy also changed. In religious periods, such as the Middle Ages in the West, the relations between God and man occupied the sharpest minds. When science began to challenge the authority of the Church, the nature of scientific inquiry and the understandings it gave us of our physical environment became the priority."

"And as a closing, listen to this story, 'Several security guards were scratching their heads in the aftermath of a bank robbery.

'But how could they have gotten away?' one wondered aloud. 'We had all the exits guarded.'

Another suggested, 'I think ... they must have gone out the entrance.'"

Before her echoes disappeared, Swara chanting,

We are a rock revolving

Around a golden sun

We are a billion children

Rolled into one

So when I hear about

The hole in the sky

Saltwater wells in my eyes *)

"And Allah knows best."

Citations & References:
- DK London, Philosophers - Their Lives and Works, Cobaltid
- Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, Routledge
- Ben-Ami Scharfstein, A Comparative History of World Philosophy : From the Upanishads to Kant, State University of New York Press
*) "Saltwater" written by Julian Lennon, Mark Spiro & Leslie Spiro
[Session 6]
[Session 4]

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