Modern Philosophy: the Rationalist Tradition

3.00 credits · Undergraduate

Prereq: 3 credits from PHIL; 3 credits from PHIL at the 2000 level excluding PHIL 2611; or permission of the Department This course investigates the thought of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, the leading seventeenth-century continental thinkers who formulated the great a priori systems. The capacity and function of human reason fully to understand the world is a theme common to these thinkers; it constitutes one of the major concerns of the course, a concern balanced by investigation of why these systems have reached such diverse answers to the substantive issues of how the world is to be understood. (Format: Lecture 3 Hours)