The Rise of Modern Philosophy

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.